Jetway: Chart your own path to fluency

I’m excited to announce the relaunch of Jetway, a new approach to language learning for intermediate learners.

Most language apps focus on beginners, but with their fixed skill trees, they don’t adapt to your interests or goals. Jetway is different. It lets you create your own path to fluency based by modeling what you skills you want and need to learn.

With Jetway you create Skillbooks that turn your goals, hobbies, and life into speaking exercises, guided chats, and curated videos. A Skillbook is simply a collection of Skills you want to learn. The easiest way to build a Skillbook is to give Jetway a topic and it will generate the skills you need to practice to speak confidently about it. I’ve built Skillbooks on architecture (French), gardening (Spanish), giving/receiving directions (Italian), seperable verbs (German), and more.

Learn by speaking with Spaced Repetition

Jetway teaches you new Skills through speaking exercises with instant feedback. Speaking exercises are proven to help you retain information better and build confidence. Then, Jetway uses something called Spaced Repetition (FSRS) to surface each skill right before it slips from memory, ensuring you retain it. (Don’t worry, you can also type answers too).

Combining speaking, spaced repetition and skills has a lot of benefits:

• Prevents rote memorization by giving you fresh exercises every time
• Immerses you in diverse vocabulary, sentence structures, and contexts
• Gets you thinking in your target language
• Improves listening comprehension by varying the voices you hear
• Zero setup: no creating decks, translations, audio, etc
• Interweaves multiple skills you’re currently learning (e.g. combines grocery shopping + past tense), improving efficiency

It also has some pretty handy features for language learners:

• Hints in your native language — showing both literal and figurative translations when appropriate
• Explanations about why your answer is incorrect
• Translations
• Ability to add new words to a Skillbook
• Keyboard shortucts

Curated YouTube videos

Watching and listening is critical to learning a language. But you can’t just go about watching your favorite TV series all the time — you’ll end up talking like a telenovela villain (not ideal for business meetings).

Jetway takes a different approach, curating videos based on what you need to learn. Jetway will look at what skills you’re learning — e.g. Describing cooking techniques, and find videos for you that use these skills.

When you watch a video, Jetway will provide real time subtitles which you can click on for translations. Don’t know a word? Click “Study” and Jetway will add it to your Skillbook for later practice.

Build confidence with chats

Just like with videos, Jetway recommends chats based on what you’re learning.

Jetway’s chat model is tuned specifically for language learners. Make a mistake, like, “I went to market today”? Jetway will model the correct phrase back to you: “You went to the market today? What did you buy?”

The great thing about the recommendation model, like with YouTube, is that it forces you to confront very specific topics you wouldn’t normally encounter and use all the skills you learned from exercises.

Connect your outside practice to Skillbooks

We don’t just learn a language to talk to AI though. We want to make new friends, get Tiktok videos, read books, and watch films.

Anyone else watching King of Stonk?

Jetway has a totally new way to connect your practice to the real world with our activity logger. Not only do you get to track your time, but you can easily add new skills to your Skillbooks from vocabulary lists, notes, or transcripts of shows!

Here are some words I learned while listening to EasyGerman last week. When you click the ✨ button, Jetway will suggest skills based on the words you highlighted. Once you’re done, you’ll instantly have spaced repetition speaking exercises based on what you just learned!

Get started

Jetway is currently free, just sign up here. Please join the Discord too. I’d love to hear from you and what Jetway can do to help get you to your destination.