Goalpost FAQs

What does Goalpost run on?

Is Goalpost a course of lessons?

Yes, there is a course included, so you can use Goalpost like a guided course. But you can also use it independently, to practise your own customised choice of conversational phrases, both speaking the language and listening to the language being spoken.

What's "Immersive" language learning?

They say the best way to learn a language is to live in the country. They call it IMMERSIVE learning.

However, most of us don't have the luxury of travelling abroad for several months a year, so Goalpost gives you an immersive experience in your own home. Because it generates foreign language phrases at random, it's much more like being abroad, where conversation is unpredictable and does not follow the ordered sequence of a typical language course.

What's different about Goalpost language audio?

Standard language courses use PRE-RECORDED audio, which is useful for learning the language and practising pronunciation. However, there is a problem. Once you've heard the audio a few times, you know in advance what it is going to say. Real speech isn't like that. It's unpredictable.

Goalpost uses GENERATED audio. It creates random unpredictable sentences, giving you practice in how a language is spoken in real-life, developing your skill-set to respond easily to real-life conversation.

Is it true the audio can be spoken more slowly?

Yes. A major problem of learning any language, especially a fast-spoken language, is the difficultly of distinguishing individual words.

Now, through the miracle of modern technology, you can hear sentences spoken from full speed down to extremely slow. Just set the speed you are comfortable with, gradually increasing it as your language recognition skills improve.

Does the app give you time to think?

It can be discouraging, listening to the audio in a typical language course, that it doesn't give you enough time to work out the translation. On the other hand, once your comprehension has improved, it's equally annoying if there is too long a pause before the correct translation is given.

Goalpost solves this problem by letting you increase or decrease the thinking time between translations, to perfectly match your current level of progress.

How quickly can I expect to learn?

Our Beginner's course is divided into fifteen progressive levels, each containing ten modules.

A person dedicating just twenty minutes a day to it could expect to work though the modules at the rate of a new one every two days. Allowing for weekends and for the unavoidable distractions of modern life, that's about a month for each level.

So, a year and three months on average to complete the course (faster or slower depending on ability and effort) That's actually very fast, to gain a thorough practical ability as a beginner in the language.

Beware of apps and courses with fancy gimmicks, fancy audio and fancy graphics designed primarily to give you encouragement. They may be disguising the fact that everything is being kept extra simple, giving you a false sense of security at your progress, which may soon be shattered when you have to speak the language in real life.

Goalpost also tries to make things easy, to encourage you, but it doesn't stay stuck on easy, constantly pushing you gently forwards towards the real encouragment, which is finding out you can actually understand people and engage in conversation in their native language.