There are a ton of apps these days to help kids learn something new. It could be a new language, it could be science, it could be history, or it could be about maths or to learn about something just out of curiosity.
But Google has done something that's an instant success and an evolving tool for not just kids but also adults to learn a language.
Initial reports in the media said that it is an app to learn reading Hindi, which is wrong. It is a multi lingual app and supports the below language/language-pairs as of today:
English only,
Hindi-English,
Telugu-English,
Marathi-English,
Bangla-English,
Urdu-English,
Tamil-English.
Spanish-English,
Portuguese-English
The first thing you notice about bolo is its user interface which is very simple and doesnt need too much of navigation. Just tap the story that you want to read/learn and it starts off sentence by sentence.
The screen scrolls automatically as the kid reads out the sentence appearing on the screen.
Another feature that is surely going to create interest among kids is the mini games that were included: simple games like pop the balloons, jumbled words and speed reading are available right now, but may get accompanied by many others soon.
Being an early access version, the app could have some bugs here and there, but so far during my 1 week of testing, I found none.
Important thing is if you kno how to read a language, even if you are an adult, you can get help from this app to improve your pronunciation in various languages, mainly Indian. for example, I can read Tamil apart from Telugu, English, Hindi and Kannada but to learn pronunciation in that language, this is going to definitely help me.
As the name itself suggests, it is meant to teach you how to speak a language and it is definitely worth trying it out.
With love.. Anil
