Hi Just_Mark!

At the moment, the app is listed as 18+, so it may not be ready just yet for a younger audience. 

But we will definitely update everyone once we make a child-friendly version!

[I would therefore like to announce the following:]

Dear BrillKids members and friends,

I'm KL Wong, Founder of BrillKids.

It's been 8 years since we started BrillKids, and I'm very grateful to see parents from all over the world engaging in early learning and to see that our products played a role in that.

When we first launched Little Reader in 2008, we discussed internally how the license key system should work, and in particular how many computers a person would be allowed to install it on. Even though many other software makers only allowed one, we decided to allow for two installations, as we felt that many parents would sometimes want to install it on both the desktop and laptop, or on both parents' computers.

Furthermore, we recognized that people often upgrade computers, so we chose to allow users to 'move' their licenses from computer to computer, and doing this up to 5 times.

In making this policy, we have always made it clear that licenses are PERSONAL to each user and may not be transferred or shared, or installed on more than 2 computers at the same time.

Sadly, our license key policy has been abused, and this abuse has been increasing recently. Even sadder, we see that some members have actively encouraged this abuse. Even though I believe that this represents a small minority of our users worldwide, it has nevertheless come to a point where we've felt the need to take more concrete action against this abuse.

I would therefore like to announce the following:

1. License keys issued from now onwards will only be allowed to be moved between computers up to twice, instead of five times.

2. Our terms of license will now only guarantee installation on ONE computer instead of two. However, we will continue to allow installation on up to two computers for the time-being, in the hope that the abuse of this policy will change for the better. If not, we will implement this in actuality without further notice.

3. We want to remind everyone that any user who we have reason to believe is violating our license terms will be liable to have the license key suspended or revoked, and the member account terminated without warning. Affiliates who participate in such violations will also risk losing their affiliate commissions.

We have always tried our best to be lenient and to assume the best of others. I believe we have done so for all these years. I therefore find it regrettable that we've had to take the above action, and that I've had to write this announcement. I'm hoping that after this I will never again have to address this issue or take any further action.

Thank you for your patience in reading the above, especially the vast majority of you who have 'played nice'. Most of all, thank you for your understanding and continued support!

Yours,

KL Wong
Founder, BrillKids

Thanks Andzhela! Yep, we do intend to have group features later on.

We can also create a 'parenting' phrasebook that covers what you mentioned. Thanks for the idea!

KL

[Hello Pal has now officially launched]

Dear BrillKids friends,

You may remember I mentioned in my last message to you ("What We've Been Up To") that we started to beta test our new app, Hello Pal. I'm now thrilled to tell you that Hello Pal has now officially launched!

Here's a Quick Tour video showing what Hello Pal is about:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGERSwxMWpI

Hello Pal is a free app (we don't even have in-app purchases!), and is now available on Google Play, and it is also now in beta testing for iOS users.

We are thrilled that we've been getting great feedback and reviews since being launched a week ago. Here are some reviews from Google Play:

ROY Berg on May 15, 2015 at 12:09 AM
Best Language Exchange app! I have tried so many language exchange apps but this one is the best by far!

Ricky Martinez on May 12, 2015 at 10:04 AM
Great App!!!! I love it so far. I just started and I already found someone to practice Japanese with!!!! Can't wait to see how this app grows.

Laura Carranza on May 10, 2015 at 3:52 AM
Great for learning Been wanting to learn Mandarin for my business dealings in China. Came across this app and wow, it has helped! I have already made a few Chinese friends and picked up a few phrases.

BONUS FOR LITTLE READER

Here's a bonus surprise for all Little Reader users - Little Reader will be getting all the phrases from Hello Pal as Little Reader categories before too long!

Hello Pal contains phrasebooks in different languages, and each contains around 2000 phrases, each with two voice recordings (normal speed and slow version), and we will be using them to create Word categories for Little Reader soon! We currently have phrasebooks in English, Chinese, French, and Japanese, with Spanish and Korean about to be launched soon.

Hope you all check out Hello Pal! If you're on it, look me up in the app (just search for user "KL")!

DOWNLOAD FROM GOOGLE PLAY

DIRECT DOWNLOAD FROM OUR WEBSITE

BETA TESTING FOR iOS

www.hellopal.com

      
Best regards,
KL
Founder and CEO
BrillKids / Hello Pal

How nice to see that not only is Shakira teaching her baby to read, but she's also talking about it!

https://www.facebook.com/shakira?fref=ts

She even posted a video:
https://www.facebook.com/shakira/videos/10153280175544560/

 

Beta for Android has started! (iOS coming in 1-2 weeks).

Please join the beta FB group if you're interested in checking it out!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/648751111919030/

Thanks so much for letting us know, Maribel! That's awesome!

[...from and with each other!]

Dear all,

It's been a very long while since I've last written to you all, and I apologize for the long radio silence.  Better late than never, however, so let me give you all an update on what we've been up to all this while!

Two years ago, my family and I relocated to China (in a beautiful city called Hangzhou, near Shanghai), in order to explore business opportunities in China for BrillKids.

After some time, what became increasingly apparent to me were two things:

   - The huge desire of Chinese people to learn English
   - The increasing desire of the rest of the world to learn Chinese

It wasn't long before I had an 'aha' moment and decided to try to address these two needs simultaneously.  After many iterations and reiterations of ideas, we began to work on a social learning app that would attempt to make it as easy as possible for:

   - Chinese speakers to learn and practice English;
   - English-speakers to learn and practice Chinese;

...from and with each other!

And actually, not just English and Chinese, but all major languages including French, Japanese and Spanish (though we expect that English and Chinese would be the most sought-after overall).

We originally planned to make this a new BrillKids products aimed at children 6 and up, called "Little Pal" (borrowing the idea of pen pals), but as we were developing it, we decided to first launch an adult version first, which addresses a larger audience and in many ways makes it easier to do.

So now, after more than a year and a half of development, we are ready to announce to coming launch of our new app, Hello Pal!

What is Hello Pal?

In short, Hello Pal is the first-ever app that will allow you to talk to people from all over the world, in completely foreign languages, within just minutes!  

Here are the key features of version 1:

1. Social Messaging

On the surface, it will seem like a social messenger app like Whatsapp, where you can chat with your friends using text and audio messages.

2. Connecting with Foreign Language Partners

The first difference is that you'll be able to search for language partners all around the world according to criteria such as nationality, location, fluent languages, learning languages, etc.

3. Phrasebook Conversations

Most importantly, integrated into the chat messenger are phrasebooks which contain phrases that are commonly used in conversations.  

Let's say you've opened a chat window with a new pal called Alice, and you'd like to speak some Mandarin Chinese to her.  

Next, just do the following:

   - Open the Chinese phrasebook
   - choose a phrase you want to say
   - listen to the guide audio
   - record your voice and send

And there - you've just spoken in Chinese to Alice!  

Can our kids use this?

Well, this app wasn't really designed for our little ones, and will not even be under BrillKids (it will be a completely separate branding and under a different company with different owners).  

Hello Pal was designed for adults and the phrases in the phrasebooks are therefore also geared towards what we anticipate adults would want to say when chatting with another adult.

This app also relies on translations to convey meaning (not pictures like with Little Reader), so depending on your child's reading level, it might be a little challenging navigate through the phrasebooks.

Having said that, I see no reason why our kids can't also use the app with our supervision.  Your child could easily be chatting in Japanese with Grandma with your supervision, for example.

I think this will do fine until such time as we get around to doing Little Pal which will be dedicated to kids and contain parental controls.

Beta Testing

We hope to start some limited beta testing soon and we would love for you all to join!  To participate, please join this Facebook group we've created for this purpose:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/648751111919030/

Please join the group and wait for news!  When the time comes to start the testing, we'll contact you through the FB group.

Please also LIKE our FB page at: www.facebook.com/hellopalchat

In the meantime, you can learn more about our app here: www.hellopal.com .

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

Best regards,

KL

UPDATE - BETA HAS STARTED! See our Beta group on FB for more details!

Yes, but make sure it's a Surface Pro and not the older RT versions.

Yep, I'm also a big fan of the Surface Pro 3, which Felicity has been using. I think it's an absolutely fantastic computer. I might get the next version for myself if my current computer goes kaput!

Apart from that, unfortunately, we currently don't have plans to make the full programs available on iOS or Android yet.  I do hope to do so one day though!!

That's awesome!!

Reminds me of the time when Felicity was also composing songs when she was young. She would just hum out a tune in her head and often add lyrics to them.  I think her first every song was when she was around 4, called "Bye Bye Ema", about saying bye to Ema the dinosaur who was about to go extinct with the rest of the dinosaurs.  It was only like 3 lines long, haha...

Do keep it up and keep on sharing!

KL

That's so nice to hear, Andrea, thanks for sharing! 

Hi all!

Thanks for all your feedback. We've had this brought up before and we thought we addressed it each time. Sorry if we missed out any.

The split, rightly or wrongly, was deliberately done that way. 

The first thing to understand is our general mentality - we don't necessarily follow tradition or convention just because it's tradition or convention. If we did, LR would be very different than what it is in almost all respects, and you would see us, for example, teaching the alphabet and letter sounds in Day 1, Session 1, Lesson 1.  LM and LMs would also be very very different.  When we design our products, we design from ground up, in ways that (again, rightly or wrongly) make more sense to us, and in ways that in our very subjective opinion would be more helpful for the baby/toddler.

The second thing to realize is that Word Split is used to highlight constituents of a word to help a child understand that a word is made up of different parts that make different sounds (unlike eg., a Chinese character), as well as highlighting grammar concepts. So sometimes we use it to highlight syllables, sometimes the starting consonant (or blends) of words, sometimes to highlight singular/plural, etc. etc.  It's whatever we want the child to pay attention to.

Regarding syllables specifically, we had a long debate as we were doing the split whether to strictly follow convention, or not.  The main question we asked ourselves was, what way would be more helpful for the child in breaking up a word, and we decided to split it the way we have done.  Again, we are aware that many would consider this to be 'wrong' as it does not follow convention or custom, and we can probably argue till the cows come home as to which would make more sense to a child.

Speaking of cows, regarding b/ird and c/ow, the lesson here is to understand the beginning syllables b and c respectively.  I'm not sure I understand why you would not want to teach a child that 'b' makes a 'buh' sound and 'c' a 'cuh' sound.  Perhaps someone can explain that to me.

In any case, here's what can be done:

1. You edit the splits to suit your liking (actually, the ability for you to do this was one reason why we decided to depart from convention, but with the new LR system where editing features are now not automatically included, this becomes more of an issue.)

2. We can re-issue the curriculum to strictly follow convention, though it would probably be very helpful to get input from you all to make sure we haven't left out anything.

Please let us know what you think! 

KL

Due to repeated violations (which have been removed again) even after Lappy's post, and at the request of the OP, this thread is now locked.

I'm afraid we're not going to see a tablet version of LMs or LM anytime soon. We're flat out working on another (new) project which we hope to announce in a couple of months or so, which I think (hope!) many of you will find just as exciting as we do.

However, I do intend for all our stuff (including LMs) to be 'tabletized' one day though!

I would suggest focusing more on infant stimulation cards at this stage, plus talking, singing, etc.  LR was designed to be used more for 4-6 months and up.  If you choose to do it now, keep the lessons very short, and as MamaOWill mentioned, don't care whether she's learning or not.  The focus is not on results, but simply on exposure.