Cambly, an English-learning app focused on actual conversation, is spreading like wildfire in Asia

Ask people who’ve learned a second language fluently how they did it, and they’ll all tell you pretty much the same thing: you’ve got to get out there and talk to people! Classes are helpful, but only to a point. Surrounding yourself with native speakers and engaging them in real conversations is ultimately the best way to take your language skills from “ready to pass a test” to “ready to live in-country.”

“If your goal is to learn to speak a language, there’s nothing that you can do better than go and talk to someone who speaks that language,” says Sameer Shariff. And now, thanks to Sameer, there’s an app for that.

Sameer is one of the folks behind Cambly, a US-based startup with an English-learning app that’s quite different from most of the other language apps out there. Fire up Cambly and you’ll just see one big red button: “Practice English.” Push it, and you’ll be connected via video chat to a native English speaker. Then, you talk. There’s no curriculum, no tests, and no vocabulary – just a real conversation about whatever you want with the native speaker on the other end of the line.

(Full disclosure: Cambly, like Tech in Asia, is funded in part by Y Combinator. See our ethics page for more details.)

Cambly grew out of personal experience, according to Shariff, who is one of the company’s founders. He and his co-founder Kevin had “both learned languages in school,” Shariff said, “but never really got to the point where we felt like we were fluent.” That is, until they started traveling. On the road, they experienced the advantages of immersion firsthand. Shariff, for example, found that learning Spanish was “much faster” in Argentina, where he could chat with native speakers to level-up his skills. Moreover, he found that these chats were “much more rewarding an experience than a traditional classroom environment.”

But no trip lasts forever, and when Shariff and his co-founder returned home, they discovered a problem. They wanted to continue speaking the language, but they could no longer simply walk around outside and find native-level speaking partners. “We really wanted a person to practice with. Just someone regular to talk to,” Shariff told Tech in Asia.

So the pair started Cambly, with an eye on solving that problem for language learners across the globe. Since more people study English than any other language, they figured that English was the best place to start. In the beginning, the pair worked on their app basically alone, but eventually the company was accepted into Y Combinator and it has since started to build out a team, including making some hires in local markets.

One of those markets, unsurprisingly, is Asia. “Asia’s a big market for us,” Shariff said, because of the intense demand for English-learning services and the lack of easily-available native speakers. Cambly isn’t free – users buy time on the app, and it connects them to native English speakers who are paid for the time they spend chatting – but that hasn’t slowed the app in Asia at all. In fact, Shariff says that Cambly has grown by a factor of ten in several Asian markets over the past year, including Korea, Japan, and China. Korea in particular has grown “almost 100x in the past year,” according to Shariff, thanks in part to the addition of a local team member who has been effectively promoting the app there.

And interestingly, although the app offers unfocused, “real-world” style conversations with native speakers, Cambly does have some uses in the classroom, too. Shariff says that some teachers are even assigning a Cambly conversation as homework, because the conversations can be recorded and then reviewed with a teacher the next day.

Obviously, Cambly has no shortage of competitors in Asia when it comes to language-learning apps. But its focus on cultural exchange with regular native speakers (rather than trained tutors) helps set it apart as a more natural and casual experience than most of the other video chat services on the market. And given that right now it’s only localized in three Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) and is growing strongly despite the lack of much on-the-ground presence in Asia, it’s not hard to imagine a bright future for Cambly in Asia’s massive English-learning app market.