Kumuni makes use of the best resources available, both online and book-based, across the courses, as well as custom guides. These include Duolingo, Memrise, iTalki, LanguagePod101, Teach Yourself, and Penguin Parallel Text, along with a comprehensive Teacher’s Guide and Grammar Guide.
Guides
Teacher’s Guide: 100 pages long, illustrated with regular screenshots, explaining in detail how each of the resources, assignments, grading systems, and even languages themselves work.
Grammar Guide: Grammar terms are sometimes, if not almost always, hard to understand. We understand this. To make language-learning easier, every course includes a Grammar Guide that explains all the terms a language-learner will come across in one simple, easy-to-understand thirty-page booklet. About 450 terms are defined in all, from basic terms like “noun” and “verb” through “definite article” and “present continuous” all the way up to “ergative” and “antipassive”.
Resources
Duolingo: The world’s most popular language-learning platform. According to an independent 2012 study, students learning with Duolingo learn three times faster than in a normal 100-hour college course and almost twice as fast as with Rosetta Stone. The Duolingo courses include not only lessons but also grammar tips and notes, sentence discussions, forums, and interactive stories.
Memrise: Using a spaced-repetition system combined with mnemonics, Memrise can teach fifty words per hour – with the assurance that students are going to remember them. These are, in short, technologically- and psychologically-advanced flashcards that adjust to your learning style. Students learn about 1000 words through Memrise per Kumuni course.
iTalki: Normally a website for language-tutoring through Skype, iTalki also has a “Journals” feature: students post written work in a language they’re learning and teachers of that language correct the writing, explaining what the student has done wrong – all for free. Students write 10-15 iTalki entries per Kumuni course.
LanguagePod101: A website for learning languages through hearing them. The Kumuni courses use their audio practice videos throughout the courses.
Teach Yourself: One of the oldest names in language education. They publish several lines of books designed for independent learners, so their textbooks are perfect for online and distributed learning. The Language II courses use Teach Yourself’s Language Tutor textbook, taking students who already have some knowledge of the language to an intermediate or low-advanced level.
Penguin Parallel Text: Penguin publishes a series of bilingual parallel-text books, with the original language on one page and the English translation on the opposite. These books contain a selection of short stories. In Language II, students read these short stories, then choose one and write something about it.