ABCLoop: A Community For English and Japanese Language Learners

I recently had a chance to visit Open Network Lab, a start-up incubation program in Tokyo, Japan. One of the first start-ups that I’d like to tell you about, among the many that I had the pleasure of seeing, is ABCLoop.com. I spoke to Franky Chung, who tells me that the service was founded in October of last year, aiming to cater to both English and Japanese learners.

The website was a little tricky to wrap my head around at first. But it’s essentially a community of English and Japanese learners where members have online conversations that are translated and checked by fellow users. You can get an idea for how the process works via the screenshot below.

I asked Franky a few more questions about ABCLoop in an effort to find out a little more about the service. He explained to me how it all got started:

Example conversation

While we were studying abroad in Japan during college we noticed that learning English in Japan was a very expensive and time consuming task. Japanese people really only have two options, which is to enroll in an English language school or finding a private tutoring through a matching site. We saw an opportunity to create an online community where Japanese people learning English can learn and practice through participating in and reading actual conversations.

Of course, ABCLoop is not the first to try to meet this need with a web service. I was curious to learn what they thought of their competition in the language learning space in Japan. Franky elaborated:

There are social networking sites dedicated to learning languages such as italki and Lang-8 and they’re great. We’re a little different in that we’re more focused on practicing and helping each other through conversations rather than writing and correcting journal entries.

But what about all those new-fangled spaced-repetition systems, I wondered. I asked him about services like Smart.fm (which recently made the dubious move from free to paid), Anki, or the crude-but-effect Surusu.

We’re also fans of Smart.fm/iKnow and other sites that have online language learning tools/courses. ABCLoop is different in that we focus on the application and practice of what you learn in the classroom or online at sites like iKnow. So for example, if you learn a new grammar structure today through an SRS service, ABCLoop would be the perfect place to apply that knowledge through conversation with real people on the Loops. In this way we are quite complementary.

While I’ve personally always been partial to an SRS as a language learning tool, I can definitely see the value of something like ABCLoop for applying and practicing what I’ve learned. Franky pointed out that the platform has themed ‘loops,’ so learners interested in photography, video games or manga (for example) can chat about their passions.