Mrinmoyee lives in Dhaka. She spends her whole day running around, jumping up and down, laughing and smiling.
She studies at a renowned English-medium school, and she’s good at everything — mathematics, science, English. All her fears lie in Bangla. The Bangla book is so hard for her that she even refuses to speak it.
Thousands of kilometres away in Austin, Texas, lives Aymaan. He’s enthusiastic and brilliant at everything. His reluctance and fears all circle around Bangla, because he has no friend, no learning materials and no teacher to learn it with.
Is Bangla becoming extinct for a whole generation? Are identity, culture, tradition and roots being lost along with the language?
Only seventy years ago, we gave our lives for our beloved language. And now? Hundreds of thousands of English-medium students in Bangladesh, and two million more children living abroad, are afraid of Bangla.
Listening first
We ran a study with almost 150 Bangladeshi parents living in the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Thailand. They badly want their children to learn Bangla and to know their roots through the language. But with old, low-grade learning materials, children don’t find it fun — they show reluctance and fear.
We were determined to face this challenge. Step by step, we analysed the market, met more than 100 parents abroad one-to-one, partnered with many of them and observed their needs closely. We piloted for seven months; through 120+ tests and a year and a half of continuous learning, pivoting and upgrading, we built a rich service with many branches.
What we built
Our one-to-one tutoring service is operating in full force, with rich Bangla learning content and a world-class curriculum. We are piloting Bangla learning games, an augmented-reality platform with Bangla stories and a Bangla learning app. We want to create a new universe of learning Bangla — one that helps people of any age, class and need learn it in a fun, easy way.
Our 50-member multidisciplinary team includes entrepreneurs, software engineers, linguists, and people from Bangla, English, IER and Business Administration. Almost 90% of our workforce is female, and they work from their own homes. We say: live anywhere, work at Tinkers.
In the 50th year of independence, we are working to spread the Bangla language, culture and tradition all over the world.