The Hungarian-Swiss startup, Skeebdo, is aiming to revolutionize English learning by enabling people to learn from digital content that they consume in their free time anyway.
The fully remote 8-person team is spread across 4 countries and recently won the “Most Developed Startup” award in one of the most prominent Hungarian startup accelerator programs.
The most important and often most difficult part of language learning is learning the large variety of words of a given language. The Skeebdo co-founder team know this very well as they are all multilingual. Something they do note is that no matter how skilled you become, learning doesn’t stop, even if you speak English like a native speaker, your vocabulary can always be enriched.
To break the tediousness of learning from textbook-like content, the team came up with an innovative, more modern ‘edutainment’ approach. Allowing learners to learn from movies and TV shows they watch and love. In other words, transforming that time spent on entertainment to time spent also learning, via very little effort.. just using Skeebdo for 5 minutes per day.
Skeebdo currently works with over 200,000 movies and TV shows and provides users with over 40,000 unique words, idioms and expressions to learn.
It is not a mere coincidence that Skeebdo has been built around watching movies. Thanks to Netflix and similar streaming services, most people spend an average of 1-2 hours daily watching movies and TV shows. “Let’s turn this fun time into useful time too.” – says Akos Farago, the co-founder who came up with the original idea behind Skeebdo.
With Skeebdo, learning all of the relevant unknown English words in a movie takes just a few minutes per day. Using the context of the word, as it was used in the movie, enables learning to come naturally and simulates real life. Flashcards, adaptively difficult challenges, and spaced repetition are all built into Skeebdo to make sure that users learn these words properly and remember them for the long term. In addition, Skeebdo tailors the English content you learn to your level of English, making it even more personalized.
As well as movies and TV shows, the team plans to expand their content offering by including YouTube videos, and potentially articles and books too.
The Skeebdo app is available on the Apple App Store and on the Google Play Store.
