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Learning dollars, Free English Learning App for India
Highlights
Born and brought up in the United States, Govinda Dasu of Santa Clara, California decided to graduate two years early from Stanford University Computer Science (California, USA) to start, Learning Dollars, a free India-focused English learning app.
Born and brought up in the United States, Govinda Dasu of Santa Clara, California decided to graduate two years early from Stanford University Computer Science (California, USA) to start, Learning Dollars, a free India-focused English learning app.
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After hearing Bill & Melinda Gates’ inspiring speech at his graduation and being advised by Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu to visit India and take part in its growth, he decided to build a mobile phone app that aspires to be an education pipeline out of poverty for crores of Indians, starting with a core fundamental module: Basic English.
The advisor of Dasu’s startup, Raju Indukuri, was so inspired after attending Prime Minister Modi’s inauguration that he took Dasu to India in summer and introduced him to many political families and corporate leaders.
Dasu was introduced to the most powerful Indians, like Reliance Executive Madhav Rao and business tycoon Srini Raju, owner of the integrated township Sricity, who are both optimistic about India’s smartphone/tablet growth, especially from an education technology perspective (50% of all 1.3b by 2020). On a separate occasion, at TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), he met KTR, the IT minister of
Telangana (son of the CM) and back in the USA, he met Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, who both confirmed this optimism.
In India, Dasu also tested Rosetta Stone on cooks, maids, drivers, watchmen, and their children (see the fb album - http://goo.gl/INXlPz). Then, Rajeshree Bora, an ex-Infosys employee, Juzer Fakhri, an Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah professor, and Govinda built their app on these testing insights.
http://www.learningdollars.com/hi/ (Android link: http://goo.gl/WXHW9K, iOS link: http://goo.gl/C6j9wI - black leaf logo) teaches English with popular global celebs, many from Bollywood and cricket. They support Hindi (with audio for illiterate learners), but will expand to all languages soon. For users to get started: just visit the site or app and click on the blue “2. हिन्दी” link at the bottom.
The app consists of a stream of phrases with a check or mini quiz every ten phrases. Learners can click right to skip easy words and directly enter challenging content if they wish. Classes can do one check every day. The phrases are based on the 4000 most frequent words in English -- enough to read the Times of India.
This is the team’s “version 1”, but with user feedback they can build an even more comprehensive (but still free) module, covering reading, writing, grammar, more phrases, and more Indian languages (using real, not automated, voices). They will also include games, animated shorts, and diagnostic tests to placelearners appropriately by skill level.
Eventually, the Learning Dollars team will even connect learners to further study and jobs (including some online jobs paying in dollars). The app intends not only to provide Indians free English education but also to make Indians more internationally aware and thereby make India more powerful on the world stage.
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