Internet Polyglot – lecții online cu Mikhail Gavryuchkov

Guten Tag! Săptămâna a început cu o discuție foarte interesantă cu Mikhail Gavryuchkov de la Internet Polyglot. El este omul din spatele proiectului care oferă lecții online pentru învățarea limbii germane, dar și a altor câteva limbi străine.

Hello, Mikhail! First of all, I would like you to tell me who are the people behind the Internet Polyglot project.

Hello! Well, Mikhail Gavryuchkov is the initiator, developer, and admin of the project. During the existence of Internet Polyglot, many people from around the world have been involved in different capacities such as software development and testing, creating lessons, audio voice recording, and processing. To name a few countries – Russia, Romania, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Netherlands, Chezh Republic, Pakistan – people from these countries worked on this project at some point in time. Some of them were volunteers, others were working on a paid basis and we are grateful to all of them – they all made great contributions. One person – Askat Asanaliev (Kyrgyzstan) has contributed a tremendous amount of work and dedication.

Which is the story of this nice project? How is it linked with the passion for the German language?

I was learning French at the time of the inception of this project. I also used other great tools, including Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur but felt that there is a need for an additional tool to help memorize words. Thus, the first version of Internet Polyglot was developed in 2005. Then it started expanding to many other languages, including German. And, at the same time, providing a way for people with all different mother tongues to learn any other languages.

During your professional activity, did you have a hard time managing as a team? If yes, what lessons did you learn from these experiences?

Of course, there have been ups and downs in working as a team. Firstly, the team always has been distributed, so communication and collaboration were a must. Fortunately, there are great tools to provide collaboration (source code repository, Scrum tools such as Jira, etc.) and communication (Skype, zoom).

After all these years and experiences with the project, how would you define success? What are the future plans for the internetpolyglot’s team?

Success is people using the site and keeps coming back. On the Champions page, we can see so many people who are dedicated to language learning and work diligently on improving their vocabulary. Future plans are, first, to provide a way to learn languages “on the go” – during walking or even driving a car. Another plan is to expand the functionality to language teachers – help them organize their classes, assignments.

Do you think that the German language is considered to be interesting in Romania? How do you think it can be developed and transformed into a more attractive language?

Germany and Romania have been part of Europe for many centuries, having lots in common in history, culture. Of course, there is a significant cultural mutual influence between these two countries that fuel interest in learning German in Romania and Romanian in Germany.

Which is your experience linked to learning and teaching the German language online? Do you think digitalization will catch entirely the educational system?

Digitalization is growing and allowing users to learn languages in more and more areas. Other areas of education are being covered with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, and others. Learning new skills becomes easier day by day thanks to modern technologies and digitalization.

Finally, please tell us which are the most important 3 ideas you would spread to teenagers that want to learn German.

One friend of mine once told me an old proverb: “A person is so many times a human, how many languages do they know”. Learning German definitely is very important from many angles – from a career perspective, from cultural development, from an ability to communicate with as many people as possible.

Puteți găsi lecțiile de Germană pe care le oferă Mikhail și echipa sa pe site-ul Internet Polyglot . Ei sunt activi și pe Facebook , dar îl puteți contacta pe Mikhail și la adresa de e-mail polyglot1@internetpolyglot.com.

Pentru alte informații utile, accesați secțiunea de articole și descoperiți sfaturi practice despre cum învățarea limbii germane poate fi mai ușoară.