It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating.
”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.”
Short of making an AGI that fluently speaks your target language, there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans.
When learning to speak and listen, you need to already understand perhaps 80% of what actual humans are speaking in order to learn the other 20% you don't already understand. If you speak to someone and only understand say 30% of what they're speaking and they you, you won't pick up any of the 70% you don't understand, assuming the native speaker even wants to continue talking to you. Interactive software tools must deduce what vocab and grammar you can already understand and speak only that plus the 10% extra it wants you to practise and reinforce. And those tools don't exist. Good language teachers who can do the same are expensive.
Reading materials are far better in this regard, but even there, most of them use a specific learning sequence as defined by national language testing and don't cater for most learners who learnt haphazardly and thus whose current knowledge is scattered all over that continuum.
When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.
Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.
He also said you know you are fluent the day you can casually joke in real time with people and make them laugh (at the joke!)
Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.
>you need to listen and interact with people in the native language.
Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.