The method

The four colors are older than the software.

They were not designed for a screen. They were fixed on paper, in one to one lessons, years before there was anything to install, because a learner who cannot see a case cannot hear one either.

Ich gebe demKoch denTopf

Nominativ derKoch who is doing it
Akkusativ denTopf what is being done to
Dativ demKoch who it is done for
Genitiv desKochs whose it is

A word wears the same color in every exercise, in every module and on every screen. That is the whole trick, and it only works because nothing else on the screen is allowed to use those four colors for anything.

It does what a teacher does.

Mark the mistake, name the rule, make the learner write the sentence again. That is the job, and it is the job edupango was built to do. The difference is not the method. The difference is how often it happens.

A teacherHere

Marks the mistake in the exercise book, and you see it next week.

Marks it in the same second, in the sentence you just wrote.

Explains the rule in German, to a learner who is still learning German.

Explains it in the language you already speak.

Sees you for ninety minutes a week.

Is there after the shift, on the tram, at half past ten.

Has twelve learners in the room and one hour for all of them.

Has one learner, and the same patience on the first sentence and on the thousandth.

That is the claim, and it is a narrow one. Not that a machine understands you better than a person does. That the correction reaches you while you still remember writing the sentence, which is the only moment it changes anything.

It does not guess.

The correction comes from a rule engine, not from a language model. It cannot invent a mistake it has not been taught, and it answers the same way on the first sentence and on the thousandth.

No AI provider sees what somebody writes. That is not a promise about our intentions, it is a fact about the architecture: there is nobody to send it to.

A rule engine

„helfen“ takes the dative. Always. So the article can only be dem, and the reason can be shown to the learner in their own language.

A language model

Usually right, occasionally confident and wrong, and never able to say why. For a person who cannot check the answer, that is the worst possible teacher.

The words come from the shift, not from a textbook.

A carer meets the ward, a cook meets the pass, a driver meets the yard. Each of them meets the same four cases while they do it, which is why one grammar carries twenty-two trades: the rule does not change with the job, only the nouns do.

And the interface speaks the language somebody already has, so nobody has to learn German through English first.

Where it comes from.

13 years
10,000+ hours
Goethe-Institut DLL teacher training
The colors came out of the classroom. The app was built around them.Luca Sotgia, edupango