ByRashi Shrivastava,
Forbes Staff.
O
n a trip to Seoul in 2018, Connor Zwick drove past what looked like normal skyscrapers. But he soon learned they were filled with classrooms, dedicated to teaching English, and ads for such classes were plastered across taxi tops and billboards. It hit him: The biggest market for his then-nascent language learning app Speak was here, not in Silicon Valley, where his headquarters were located. “English language learning there was like an obsession,” he recalls. “There was such latent demand.”
But the language training on offer was often ineffective. Students spent hours learning the basics from textbooks and pre-recorded videos, overseen by instructors who lacked fluency. The antiquated methods emphasized learning grammar and vocabulary over actually speaking out loud. “Everything was so academic and there was this fear of making mistakes,” Zwick said.
