[barrell]

Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.

This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.

[graypegg]

That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...

Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?

[barrell]

My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.

I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).

I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)