I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish. I travel to Mexico often, live in a culture where I am surrounded by the Spanish language and I know tons of Spanish speakers. What I have always lacked however, was the motivation to consistently study the language.

I’m not entirely sure how I got there, but I had a eureka moment about the problem that went something like this… “I’m online most of my day, so what if my web browser could teach me Spanish?”.

I started by creating a browser plugin to ‘pop’ open a new tab with a quiz about a Spanish word every few minutes. Next I built some tools to help me learn faster. The first was a retention requirement to help me remember the word I’d just seen. Then came a banked list for words I knew and a hardlist for words that I needed to study more. Then I made it easy to make my own quizzes and flashcards (which I call Poplings) containing content like common phrases and pronunciation.

All these tools started to form the type of application I had hoped it would be. Popling doesn’t make me follow a set structure and I don’t have to set aside time to study, it just fits my right into my day. The coolest thing though, is that it can help you learn anything you want too… French, German, Math, Art History, 3 letter Scrabble words, or whatever you can find or create a Popling for.

Popling is currently in a closed beta version so I can work the kinks out. If you want to be notified when it goes live, leave a comment here.