10 Years of Mondly | 10 Stories – Story 2: 1,320 PAIRS

7,146. That’s how many languages linguists estimate there are in the world today.

Being based in Brașov, Romania, founders Alex and Tudor were right in the middle of this rich tapestry of language.

But for those interested in learning another language, there was one language that was key: English.

The problem

“Being born and growing up in Romania, we understood that if you wanted to learn a language you had to go through English. For my parents and some of our friends, that was a blocker,” explains Tudor.

All the language learning apps that existed in 2013 relied on users speaking English.

It wasn’t enough to just understand a little English, users would need to be confident enough to follow lessons, understand grammar, and double translate vocabulary.

“We understood that pain, and we wanted to build an app for our friends, for our parents — we wanted to build an app for everyone”, he finishes.

The aim

Mondly was a hit in its first year, but Alex and Tudor were already looking at how they could innovate to make language learning accessible and available to more people.

The premise was simple: Mondly users should be able to learn any language directly from their first language.

“What we were aiming for is reflected in the name itself,” says Adrian Raduca, the first Mondly employee.

“It mixes ‘le monde’, French for ‘the world’, with ‘worldly’ from English. That was who we wanted to reach and help. The world was — and still is — our user base”.

Making it happen

Language pairing on this scale had never been done before — there was no blueprint, no shortcut.

Making that vision a reality with just a small team of eight people required dedication, perseverance, and creativity.

“We created a system where, with a very small team, we could manage a virtually infinite number of languages. Once you plug in a language to the system, you can learn any language from any language”, explains Alex.

It was an approach that would make a significant impression on Pearson many years later.

“Looking under the hood,” remembers Gian Paolo, CTO at Pearson, “what surprised me was how cleverly they did the infrastructure to ensure that these different language combinations were done in a very frugal way.“They’d built their own tools internally to do the translations and were early adopters of automation and AI to bring it all together.”

The only thing left to do was to put it to the test.

The launch

By June 2015, Mondly launched both a web and Android version with more than 30 different languages available.

Mondly users could learn Mandarin from Turkish, Farsi from Romanian, Russian from Spanish.

People were no longer limited by their English skills, opening up the magic of language learning to many more people around the world.

It was a huge success, and that month, Mondly downloads crossed the one-million mark, reaching 1.2 million downloads by the end of the month.

1,320 pairs

Today, Mondly users can choose from 41 different languages, learning directly from the language they grew up speaking.

That’s an incredible 1320 possible language pairings and an infinite number of opportunities for Mondly users around the world.

No other app offers so many different languages and so many different pairing combinations.

For Mondly’s Marketing Director, Cristian Balau, who joined the team in 2018, “Mondly makes language learning truly global”.

“Whether it’s romance, travel, or work, there are a myriad of different reasons people choose to learn a language. Whatever their reason, whatever the language, there’s Mondly”.

— Read the next story in our 10-part series: There’s Soul in a Language

THE MILESTONES 

• Mondly web and Android app launches in 30 languages (June 2015)
• 1.3 million downloads (June 2015)
• 12 employees (Dec 2015)