How I started learning languages
I learned my first second language the old-fashioned way: total immersion. I spent two years in New Caledonia teaching myself French. Every morning I put in three hours of reading and memorizing vocabulary. Every afternoon I went out and talked to people. That was the whole method. Learn it in the morning, use it in the afternoon. It worked, and it's been my mental model for language learning ever since — it's also the core idea behind Allomorpheus.
In college I started teaching myself Arabic, and eventually did a study abroad where I ran the same playbook on a tighter clock. I got to Advanced-Mid on the Arabic OPI — the Oral Proficiency Interview, basically a long, recorded conversation where a tester tries to find the edge of what you can say. Arabic confirmed what French had already taught me: motivation beats everything, and the best vocabulary is the vocabulary you actually use.
From languages to linguistics
Somewhere in there I stopped being content just speaking languages and got obsessed with how they work — especially the ones with truly complicated morphology. That pulled me into computational linguistics: an MSc in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington, then a PhD in Computational Linguistics at Charles Darwin University in Australia.
I spent those years working on polysynthetic and morphologically complex languages — the kind where a single word can carry what English needs a whole sentence for. I built finite state morphological analyzers, interactive transcription systems, and word completion tools for languages like Plains Cree and Kunwinjku. Here's the thing that work taught me: if you really understand a language's structure, from full discourse down to the individual morphs, you can build tools that genuinely help people learn it. That's the perspective I brought to Allomorpheus.
Selected publications
Everything below is on ACL Anthology.
Interactive Word Completion for Plains Cree
ACL 2022 (Long Papers) · William Lane, Atticus Harrigan, Antti Arppe
A Finite State Approach to Interactive Transcription
FieldMatters 2022 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Bootstrapping Techniques for Polysynthetic Morphological Analysis
ACL 2020 (Main Conference) · William Lane, Steven Bird
Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages
COLING 2020 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku
ALTA 2019 · William Lane, Steven Bird
Why I built Allomorpheus
Every language app I tried made the same mistake. They gamified the process and called it learning. Streaks. Points. Pre-packaged lessons. Not one of them treated language as a structural system you could actually understand and build on.
So I built the thing I wish I'd had in New Caledonia, and again with Arabic. Allomorpheus lets you immerse in content you care about, build a personal vocabulary grounded in real use, review with spaced repetition, and practice with an AI tutor that adapts to your actual mistakes. No gamification. No pre-packaged lists. Just the structure and the tools — the morning/afternoon cycle, turned into software.
If you want the full philosophy behind all this, read How I Actually Learn Languages.
7 days free — no credit card required