Inspired by Dad's struggles with English, NJ native's app aims for judgment-free learning
Growing up in Palisades Park, Michiyo Kawasaki watched her father, Osamu, who immigrated to America from Japan in his 20s, struggle to communicate. He knew only a few words of English when he arrived in the U.S. and taught himself the language with the help of her mother.
Osamu Kawasaki, who died in 2003, had opened one of Bergen County's first sushi restaurants, in Tenafly, and was a founding member of the Niko Niko baseball team of the Japanese American Association.
He was a college graduate and a successful business owner. But he never mastered the nuances of English or lost his Japanese accent, and his daughter saw the ways in which people treated him differently because of the sound of his speech.
That experience inspired her to create a language learning app focused on conversation, to help people learn how to speak a foreign language like a nativespeaker.
“He always struggled, and as a kid I observed the impact that had on him,” said Michiyo Kawasaki, 44. “I understood how language can forge connections if you are able to perform but can also be marginalizing if you don’t sound in a way people perceive to be acceptable.”
After spending her career in investment banking and finance, Kawasaki, who relocated to Kentucky with her family, worked for the past two years developing Kleo, a language app designed to mimic the feedback and modeling a student would get from working with a tutor.
The app has undergone early testing on Android devices and recently launched for the iPhone. Unlike a picture- or text-based approach, Kleo is focused on getting people speaking through immersing the user in dialogue. Users interact back and forth with videos of people speaking from their homes, or at a market or restaurant in Italy, Spain or Germany. Its developers are working to expand offerings to French and Japanese.
Language apps have grown in popularity, promising to teach users how to read, write or speak a new language, all from their phones. In 2020, when many people stayed inside at home because of the COVID pandemic, more than 30 million people downloaded Duolingo, the most popular language app. Now more than a decade old, the app has 500 million users worldwide.
Teacher shortages continue: Here's what New Jersey is doing to make it easier to hire more
Language: How a little earbud is changing life for foreign-born kids at Bergen County school
But while users can learn basics from apps, it is hard to replace the benefits of speaking with and learning from another human being, said Simon Zuberek, an educational technologist at Columbia University’s Language Resource Center.
Many available apps are based on educational approaches that were in vogue a quarter of a century ago, he said. Since then, the field has evolved — it is less focused on grammar and more informed by cultural understanding and pragmatics, or natural language used in communication. These approaches are very difficult to emulate through software, Zuberek said.
“Most apps are helpful when it comes to vocabulary or reading comprehension, but at this point, at least, they can only go so far,” he said. "If you want to be fully conversant and functional in a language and culture, you should probably look at some kind of training with another human being.”
Through Kleo, Kawasaki tries to address some of those drawbacks by focusing on learning through conversation.
The experience gives people a judgment-free space to practice speaking a language with which they may not feel entirely comfortable.
“It was really born from the idea of capturing that feeling of learning in person,” Kawasaki said. “I’m hoping people will be excited by the chance to practice speaking and build that muscle memory to become more confident.”
Scott Baines-Jordan, an early user of the app, said that over the years he’s used many language apps to broaden his skills in Japanese, Spanish and German. Kleo doesn’t focus on rote learning, or mimic being in a classroom, but it gives a sense of one-on-one instruction to help users practice speaking, he said.
“I think the hardest part in learning a language is you can feel like you can read it in a book or looking at a menu, but to actually come up with a sentence on the fly, that’s the hangup,” he said. “This gets you talking and gets you comfortable.”
Megan Burrow is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: burrow@northjersey.com
Twitter: @MegBurrow
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: New language learning app Kleo aims to mimic a human tutor
