Bliu Bliu: ‘the only company in the world that teaches languages we don’t even know’

In the words of its founder and CEO, self-declared ‘visionary’ Claudio Santori, Bliu Bliu is ‘the only company in the world that teaches languages we don’t even know’. This claim, which was made during a pitch  for funding in October 2014, tells us a lot about the Bliu Bliu approach. It assumes that there exists a system by which all languages can be learnt / taught, and the particular features of any given language are not of any great importance. It’s questionable, to say the least, and Santori fails to inspire confidence when he says, in the same pitch, ‘you join Bliu Bliu, you use it, we make something magical, and after a few weeks you can understand the language’.

The basic idea behind Bliu Bliu is that a language is learnt by using it (e.g. by reading or listening to texts), but that the texts need to be selected so that you know the great majority of words within them. The technological challenge, therefore, is to find (online) texts that contain the vocabulary that is appropriate for you. After that, Santori explains , ‘you progress, you input more words and you will get more text that you can understand. Hours and hours of conversations you can fully understand and listen. Not just stupid exercise from stupid grammar book. Real conversation. And in all of them you know 100% of the words. […] So basically you will have the same opportunity that a kid has when learning his native language. Listen hours and hours of native language being naturally spoken at you…at a level he/she can understand plus some challenge, everyday some more challenge, until he can pick up words very very fast’ (sic).

On entering the site, you are invited to take a test. In this, you are shown a series of words and asked to say if you find them ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’. There were 12 words in total, and each time I clicked ‘easy’. The system then tells you how many words it thinks you know, and offers you one or more words to click on. Here are the words I was presented with and, to the right, the number of words that Bliu Blu thinks I know, after clicking ‘easy’ on the preceding word.

hello	4145
teenager	5960
soap, grape	7863
receipt, washing, skateboard	9638
motorway, tram, luggage, footballer, weekday	11061

Finally, I was asked about my knowledge of other languages. I said that my French was advanced and that my Spanish and German were intermediate. On the basis of this answer, I was now told that Bliu Bliu thinks that I know 11,073 words.

Eight of the words in the test are starred in the Macmillan dictionaries, meaning they are within the most frequent 7,500 words in English. Of the other four, skateboard, footballer and tram are very international words. The last, weekday, is a readily understandable compound made up of two extremely high frequency words. How could Bliu Bliu know, with such uncanny precision, that I know 11,073 words from a test like this? I decided to try the test for French. Again, I clicked ‘easy’ for each of the twelve words that was offered. This time, I was offered a very different set of words, with low frequency items like polynôme, toponymie, diaspora, vectoriel (all of which are cognate with English words), along with the rather surprising vichy (which should have had a capital letter, as it is a proper noun). Despite finding all these words easy, I was mortified to be told that I only knew 6546 words in French.

I needn’t have bothered with the test, anyway. Irrespective of level, you are offered vocabulary sets of high frequency words. Examples of sets I was offered included [the, be, of, and, to], [way, state, say, world, two], [may, man, hear, said, call] and [life, down, any, show, t]. Bliu Bliu then gives you a series of short texts that include the target words. You can click on any word you don’t know and you are given either a definition or a translation (I opted for French translations). There is no task beyond simply reading these texts. Putting aside for the moment the question of why I was being offered these particular words when my level is advanced, how does the software perform?

The vast majority of the texts are short quotes from brainyquote.com, and here is the first problem. Quotes tend to be pithy and often play with words: their comprehensibility is not always a function of the frequency of the words they contain. For the word ‘say’, for example, the texts included the Shakespearean quote It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood. For the word ‘world’, I was offered this line from Alexander Pope: The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Not, perhaps, the best way of learning a couple of very simple, high-frequency words. But this was the least of the problems.

The system operates on a word level. It doesn’t recognise phrases or chunks, or even phrasal verbs. So, a word like ‘down’ (in one of the lists above) is presented without consideration of its multiple senses. The first set of sentences I was asked to read for ‘down’ included: I never regretted what I turned down, You get old, you slow down, I’m Creole, and I’m down to earth, I never fall down. I always fight, I like seeing girls throw down and I don’t take criticism lying down. Not exactly the best way of getting to grips with the word ‘down’ if you don’t know it!

You may have noticed the inclusion of the word ‘t’ in one of the lists above. Here are the example sentences for practising this word: (1) Knock the ‘t’ off the ‘can’t’, (2) Sometimes reality T.V. can be stressful, (3) Argentina Debt Swap Won’t Avoid Default, (4) OK, I just don’t understand Nethanyahu, (5) Venezuela: Hell on Earth by Walter T Molano and (6) Work will win when wishy washy wishing won t. I paid €7.99 for one month of this!

The translation function is equally awful. With high frequency words with multiple meanings, you get a long list of possible translations, but no indication of which one is appropriate for the context you are looking at. With other words, it is sometimes, simply, wrong. For example, in the sentence, Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave, the translation for ‘grave’ was only for the homonymous adjective. In the sentence There’s a bright spot in every dark cloud, the translation for ‘spot’ was only for verbs. And the translation for ‘but’ in We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving was ‘mais’ (not at all what it means here!). The translation tool couldn’t handle the first ‘for’ in this sentence, either.

Bliu Bliu’s claim that Bliu Bliu knows you very well, every single word you know or don’t know is manifest nonsense and reveals a serious lack of understanding about what it means to know a word. However, as you spend more time on the system, a picture of your vocabulary knowledge is certainly built up. The texts that are offered begin to move away from the one-liners from brainyquote.com. As reading (or listening to recorded texts) is the only learning task that is offered, the intrinsic interest of the texts is crucial. Here, again, I was disappointed. Texts that I was offered were sourced from IEEE Spectrum (The World’s Largest Professional Association for the Advancement of Technology), infowars.com (the home of the #1 Internet News Show in the World), Latin America News and Analysis, the Google official blog (Meet 15 Finalists and Science in Action Winner for the 2013 GoogleScience Fair) MLB Trade Rumors (a clearinghouse for relevant, legitimate baseball rumors), and a long text entitled Robert Waldmann: Policy-Relevant Macro Is All in Samuelson and Solow (1960) from a blog called Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality……with the Neural Network of a Moderately-Intelligent Cephalopod.

There is more curated content (selected from a menu which includes sections entitled ‘18+’ and ‘Controversial Jokes’). In these texts, words that the system thinks you won’t know (most of the proper nouns for example) are highlighted. And there is a small library of novels, again, where predicted unknown words are highlighted in pink. These include Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Gogol, Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oblomov, H.P. Lovecraft, Joyce, and Poe. You can also upload your own texts if you wish.

But, by this stage, I’d had enough and I clicked on the button to cancel my subscription. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the system crashed and a message popped up saying the system had encountered an error.

Like so many ‘language learning’ start-ups, Bliu Bliu seems to know a little, but not a lot about language learning. The Bliu Bliu blog has a video of Stephen Krashen talking about comprehensible input (it is misleadingly captioned ‘Stephen Krashen on Bliu Bliu’) in which he says that we all learn languages the same way, and that is when we get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment. Influential though it has been, Krashen’s hypothesis remains a hypothesis, and it is generally accepted now that comprehensible input may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for language learning to take place.

The hypothesis hinges, anyway, on a definition of what is meant by ‘comprehensible’ and no one has come close to defining what precisely this means. Bliu Bliu has falsely assumed that comprehensibility can be determined by self-reporting of word knowledge, and this assumption is made even more problematic by the confusion of words (as sequences of letters) with lexical items. Bliu Bliu takes no account of lexical grammar or collocation (fundamental to any real word knowledge).

The name ‘Bliu Bliu’ was inspired by an episode from ‘Friends’ where Joey tries and fails to speak French. In the episode, according to the ‘Friends’ wiki, ‘Phoebe helps Joey prepare for an audition by teaching him how to speak French. Joey does not progress well and just speaks gibberish, thinking he’s doing a great job. Phoebe explains to the director in French that Joey is her mentally disabled younger brother so he’ll take pity on Joey.’ Bliu Bliu was an unfortunately apt choice of name.