There will be 100 million students all over the world studying Mandarin in 2020. Learning a new language is hard, especially one from a different linguistic family than your native language. Many Mandarin learners have trouble practicing tone and pronunciation, as well as finding authentic contexts to practice conversation.
Lingal is a Mandarin teaching platform that uses situated learning to improve conversation ability and pronunciation. Users practice colloquial speech through interactive first-person videos, as if they are talking to a real person through their phone. Proper tone pronunciation is taught with a graphical line visualization with instant scoring feedback.