Appendix 2 - Principles

The following list presents the each principle’s name and current walk-through script.

Speak Out Loud

Welcome to our speak-first approach! This is the core principle of this whole app: speak. Don’t simply read. Speak. Don’t mumble. SPEAK. Out, loud, as clear as you can. You need to do that, otherwise, you will be using LanguageBug all wrong.

Find yourself a comfortable place where you have no distractions. Then, make sure that you can freely speak aloud. You may feel a little self-conscious If there are people around you, so try to find an empty room or a distant place. You’ll be speaking a lot!

Speak Fast

Most language classes will make you speak s-u-p-e-r s-l-o-w when you’re a student. I know it’s hard to pronounce foreign sounds at the beginning, but paying too much attention to each phoneme will not help. It will make you bored, maybe overwhelmed too.

Also, guess what? Speakers of any language do not speak in real life as slowly as in language classes. On the contrary, we’re cnnectin’ letters’and sounds’all the time. By speaking fast from the beginning, you’ll be better prepared to understand native speakers.

Yes, speaking fast may sometimes be challenging. But, wait, isn’t that cool? You will keep your focus, plus you won’t be wasting time. In fact, by making it all fast-paced, you can do MORE exercises in LESS time. Simple as that.

Avoid writing

It is very common to associate writing with studying. That’s because most times we are taking lessons, there is a notebook with us. This is actually a great habit that most people have since school time. Writing things down can definitely be helpful.

But these exercises are designed to be paperless and distraction-free. If you stop to write down every time you don’t want to forget anything, you will end up losing concentration. The less concentrated you are, the less information you will retain.

So, how about you start to think of LanguageBug as your interactive notebook? You can always access here all the words and expressions you are learning. Why would you bother to write things down? Make better use of your time: speak!

Keep Focused

Multi-tasking is a trend, so you’re probably used to use learning apps while also texting your friends, watching TV, and eating a slice of pizza. Of course, reducing the attention you give to your practice will impact the progress you will make.

That’s why this whole app will try to keep you focused (but, please, cooperate with us!). No buttons, no keyboard, no speech recognition, everything happening so fast that if you’re doing more than one thing at the time, you’ll miss it all.

You will not remember

It would be good if we all had a photographic memory, but that’s not the case. That being said, do not worry about memorizing every single word you see in the exercises. This will happen naturally and at your own pace as you keep practicing.

Think about these exercises as if they were gym workouts, for example. Imagine that your “muscles” will get stronger each time you perform an exercise. Without hurry, you will gradually be able to lift more and more weight as you keep practicing.