I actually thought of a similar idea before, while I was meditating in rural Philippines attempting to figure out a viable business idea and trying to avoid a return to the rat race in the US. Unfortunately, the idea seemed too daunting to take on by myself.
I don't know if Duolingo already has plans to incorporate it, but I had also originally thought that 'word completion' functionality would assist in the process of learning a new language. For example, a beginner trying to learn the Tagalog language (but knows a few simple words) could begin by typing the word 'Gusto', and then typing a space after the word would produce a drop-down with possible words that could follow, such as 'ko', 'niya', 'nila', 'mo', etc. In essence, it would be 'Intellisense' functionality that provides grammatically correct word-completion to help students learn sentence structure -- which is a major part of learning a foreign language, as opposed to just translating / memorizing fragments (e.g. words). I was even to the point where I was considering how an AI approach using an inference engine / chaining might make this
process more efficient.
Anyway, I e-mailed Luis von Ahn about it, but he was probably too busy to read or react to my e-mail. I am just happy to see someone else was able to make the idea a reality -- another testament that brilliant ideas are virtually worthless without brilliant execution.
That style of IntelliSense would be fantastic for languages that change the ending based on context (aka declination). I know I had troubles learning Finnish because of this, and even the easy Esperanto was tricky at first.
I don't know if Duolingo already has plans to incorporate it, but I had also originally thought that 'word completion' functionality would assist in the process of learning a new language. For example, a beginner trying to learn the Tagalog language (but knows a few simple words) could begin by typing the word 'Gusto', and then typing a space after the word would produce a drop-down with possible words that could follow, such as 'ko', 'niya', 'nila', 'mo', etc. In essence, it would be 'Intellisense' functionality that provides grammatically correct word-completion to help students learn sentence structure -- which is a major part of learning a foreign language, as opposed to just translating / memorizing fragments (e.g. words). I was even to the point where I was considering how an AI approach using an inference engine / chaining might make this process more efficient.
Anyway, I e-mailed Luis von Ahn about it, but he was probably too busy to read or react to my e-mail. I am just happy to see someone else was able to make the idea a reality -- another testament that brilliant ideas are virtually worthless without brilliant execution.