Byki employs a unique philosophy of language teaching that is referred to as “declarative learning”. This means that whatever you’re learning needs to become a habit. The Byki system teaches Spanish by collecting words and phrases like items in a basket. The belief is that the student would then have more to work with when using the language.
Byki claims to embrace technology and the unique advantages that can be offered to students learning Spanish online. They feature blogs, tagging, the use of YouTube videos, and some parts of the website can be accessed through iPhones and iPods. They even have a feature that enables students to slow down podcasts to hear the voice better. This was indeed impressive (not to mention helpful).
Unfortunately, Byki does not live up to their claims. They may give students access to forums and blogs, but the actual use of their social media options was less than spectacular since very few entries have been made. The ones that were made seemed to be entries made by Byki staff as advertising ploys. Nowhere were there links to the archives of forum or blog entries to be found, which was indeed puzzling.
In addition, the interfaces for learning the mechanics of Spanish were not particularly appealing. In fact, it made learning Spanish boring and tedious in comparison to some of our higher ranked services to Learn Spanish Online.
We were unable to locate articles or even blog or forum entries that were real commentary on how to better learn Spanish. If interesting entries were to be added, the entire Byki approach would be greatly improved.
We were unable to find any type of stories or even hints of the integration of vocabulary and structures into any kind of stories. Byki should try to incorporate the use of story into its approach.
In spite of the social media in use by Byki, there was no chance for true audio interaction which would lead to the building up of conversational Spanish.
Byki has one option that is truly unique. They have a mechanism that enables students to record their own voices and then play the recording back so they can auto correct their own voices. But it doesn’t end there. Students can also compare their recorded voices with the voices of native speakers reading the same text. This is something no other Spanish learning website has. Surely many students will find this approach very beneficial.
Although there weren’t actually tutors on Byki (that we could find), the social media employed by Byki enables learners to collect content and then share that content with other students. This is indeed an impressive use of technology and we can only hope that Byki grows and enables students to avail themselves of Byki’s technologies.
Although tutors were not available, the concept of using social media is a teaching tool that takes advantage of being utilized by more people, although this is something that Byki doesn’t appear to have been successful in yet. We can only hope that in the future it gains a foothold and the blogs and forums become populated with meaningful and interesting entries.
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