20. Kaizen Languages

kaizen languages

Company: Kaizen Languages

Website: https://www.kaizenlanguages.com/

Founder(s): Patrick Allen (CTO & Co-Founder) & Stuart Barrass (CEO & Co-Founder)

 

kaizen languages

 

About Kaizen Languages

 

Kaizen Languages was founded after Patrick and Stuart were discussing how difficult language acquisition is and how best to maintain the languages they had learned. After a lengthy discussion, they found the biggest issue is access to high-quality speaking practice and frequent feedback. In fact, it’s a serious issue, with the average English speaker needing to spend 700 hours speaking Spanish to master the language. This rises further for languages like Mandarin Chinese and Japanese which need 2,400 hours! Considering that an hour of 1-to-1 tuition can easily cost £15, this is a lot of time and money to reach fluency. Witnessing the rise of AI, they decided to tackle the problem of learning and maintaining languages using AI tutors to not only provide the conversation practice students need to succeed, but also with the goal of reducing the number of hours required overall as well.

They have learned that language learners are an incredibly diverse customer base, with over 1 billion language learners globally. Their motivations range significantly from wanting to learn a language for their careers, family, travel or just for fun. The languages also have unique appeal, the reason many people learn Japanese or Korean is very different from why many learn English or Spanish. This has led them to learn more about how to solve a large problem for very different learners with different goals.

They’ve reached the top 100 education apps on the app store, teaching Spanish and Japanese to English speakers, but they are just getting started. They have just launched their Android app as well, and are pushing on to releasing their English course later this year. That’ll mean that they will be able to help 75% of language learners learning a language around the world! But they don’t want to stop there, after English they plan to cover the top 10 languages with their AI tutors which should mean they can help closer to 90% of language learners.