Sunlo: social language learning
Create your own flash cards, pick from a crowd-sourced pool, or send your friend some key phrases to help them learn.
Create your own flash cards, pick from a crowd-sourced pool, or send your friend some key phrases to help them learn.
Sunlo's approach is phrases-first, useful for people who are immersed in a new language context and want to learn for immediate use – how to ask for directions or order tea or swear at your friends.
We think this is effective, and motivating – and it means you can choose the areas you focus on to suit your goals.
We don't learn languages to earn gems or score points – we learn to connect with people.
When you move to a new city, take a new job, or want to learn the language of your extended family, you will always find people who want to help, which is why Sunlo has a special “Friend Mode” so your new friends can send you all their favourite phrases and help you along your journey.
Often times, trying to translate literally from one language to another doesn't really work, but if you spend enough time clicking around you will start to catch on to the patterns.
Sunlo is meant to feed your curiosity and reward it, because that feeling of wonder and excitement keeps your brain in its best learning space.
If you just moved to a new place, and you're surrounded by people speaking another language, Sunlo is for you.
Our approach works best when you have daily opportunities to deploy your new skills and build on them – and when you have friends, family or colleagues who are excited to help you learn.
If you're the one helping a friend or colleague learn your language, Sunlo's “Friend Mode” is for you! Teach them the lyrics to a favourite song, or how to order at lunch for the table.
You can pick from our public pool of flash cards, or create new ones that will help the whole community too.
If you haven't yet learned your family's ancestral language, and now you feel a barrier between yourself and your grandparents or your cousins, this is the “linguistic generation gap.”
We are here to help – go ahead and dive into Sunlo, and ask your parents or your fun cousin to join as a friend and help you along the way.
Sunlo is a labour of love that started in 2015 when I came to India and found tools like the owl app lacking. (You know the one...)
I found I didn't need to know the word for “Tomato” as much as I needed to be able to point at the tomato and say “give me 6 of those (polite).” When I learned to do this, the rest started to fall into place.
As I tried other methods and researched the science of language-learning I started to feel a lack of good tools for helping people learn languages that are different in structure from the ones they're raised on. Learning Spanish from English may be straight-forward with lessons on vocabulary and grammar, but the same approach might not work to learn Arabic, Xhosa or Mandarin, whose grammars and patterns may be too unfamiliar for me to succeed with that formulaic approach.
The answer to this problem seems to be a phrase-based approach, where you don't necessarily try to understand every meaning and tense, you learn chunks of meaning that you can use in real life. And when you do, it creates a reward in your brain and helps you connect with others in your world, both of which aid in the formation of lasting, usable memory.
There's a fantastic (and free) app called Anki – which I also use and love! – which takes this phrase-based approach, and their background doc does a great job of explaining why it's so effective.
But the most important part of my learning journey was the friends I made who were excited to help me. There are a couple of friends who have an intuitive sense of how much I know and don't know, and are able to speak to me in a way that they know I'll understand enough of what they're saying that I can learn and figure out the rest.
So Sunlo is a bit of a love song to those friends – the very reason we learn in the first place – to make them main characters in the play as well. It invites them to help curate your deck of flash cards and find or create the ones they think you'll need and use and love. If you're a friend helping a newcomer learn your language – Sunlo is for you too. Thank you, and welcome! I hope you love it.
– M
For now Sunlo is just me, trying to learn languages to connect with the people I love. It is my humble wish that it may help others do the same 🙏
If you have feedback or suggestions or requests, please do get in touch. Sunlo can't be everything to everyone, but it can always get better! ❤️
If you're a developer or a language expert and would like to help, check out the code on GitHub or find me on socials (tw & bsky).
