During her decade-long stay in Canada, Aneesha Jyoti would often come across friends, colleagues and friends wanting to learn their native Indian language. At community gatherings, she would find many rue the fact that their kids were not rooted in their native culture.
Some who did look for options to explore learning their language, found it boringly academic, expensive, time-consuming, and not relevant to their needs. Also, it was not just Indians, but even the non-Indian community that was keen to learn Indian languages.
“While the world is betting on India as the next big Asian opportunity, there is no accessible platform that unites all Indian languages and its diverse cultures in an engaging, relevant, and cost-effective way,” she says.
On her return to India, Aneesha connected with Vatsala Sharma and Puneet Singh, and co-founded Language Curry. This unique platform is making India accessible, one language at a time. With its app launched last year, the Gurugram-based platform targets NRIs, expats and tourists. The bootstrapped startup focuses on colloquial language. With over 1,00,000 downloads across 120 countries, the feedback has been phenomenal. “It’s overwhelming.
Close to 80 percent of our Hindi and Kannada learners are from South India,” says Vatsala. In the past six-odd months, the platform saw a surge of almost 100 percent increase in downloads. Language Curry equips its learners with contextual and conversational learning.
The user not only learns the ‘what’ or ‘how’ of speaking Indian languages but also receives short cultural capsules that explain the ‘why’ behind it.
While there was much speculation regarding whether Indians would be keen on learning regional languages, the founders realised that many wanted to learn a new language to connect better.
Globally, non-Indians who are either married to or dating Indians are eager students. They want to be close to their partners’ cultures and language is always the first step. “Language Curry also endorses the New Education Policy 2020 where learning two native languages is a must. Besides, multilingualism has greater cognitive benefits for young children,” says Puneet.
The founders believe that speaking while learning is the most effective way to retain a language, thus they offer live classes with experts. Audio and visual aids help introduce words and phrases which are then tested through games. The platform currently offers five Indian languages—Sanskrit, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi and Gujarati. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is the second-most favoured language on the app. It plans to add around four more languages by December.