Learning a new language takes a lot of effort and time.

But imagine, you could learn a language without even trying – while you waste your time on the Internet.

With Langenscheidt you can – by using the technique of subliminal learning.

Subliminal, because we use a new media space, that nobody really recognises - the tiny time slot it takes t load a new website. 0.5 seconds, that’s long enough to teach you a new language.

We developed a browser plugin, that searches for learnable words on the website you’re on. Here it filters out everything irrelevant, detects vocables that are beneficial to your learning experience, cross-references them with the target URL and ranks them with an intelligent algorithm. And the plug-in itself learns, too. It remembers what it taught you and chooses new vocabulary accordingly.

The user can tailor the product to his or her own needs. He can choose between difficulty levels, languages, topics - and content-related learning. Depending on the kind of websites he visits, the software recognizes the content related terms and directly chooses vocabulary out of this context, e.g. sports-related phrases or politics.

In average our target audience generates around 100 clicks per hour while surfing the web, which can add up to 700 words a day per user. That’s over four thousand direct contacts with the brand per week – per person!

The plug-in already generated more than 4 million interactions with the brand – growing every second. People were able to learn thousands of new words. And all of that with media costs of exactly 0 €. The plug-in was developed internally and the only costs that accumulate are the server costs for the Langenscheidt database – which already existed beforehand.

People spent in average 7 hours a day on the internet. That’s 49 hours a week – often without any educational effect.

That’s why we invented a new product, that teaches people languages without changing their habits - while they surf on the web.

Langenscheidt is the biggest publishing house for foreign languages in Europe. But their printed hard- and softcover dictionaries are being pushed out more and more by digital offers. Langenscheidt needed to catch up with the competition. They needed to find a completely new way to enthuse Internet users by their competence and innovative strength.

To get there, we had to do more than just generating digital versions of their dictionaries, but inventing a whole new product.