I built Dioma for myself

I came back to Hebrew in 2022 after fifteen years away. I had a tutor and time blocked out every week, but after 2 years, I still wasn't making progress quickly enough. The more I looked at why I was stuck, the more I realized that there were no tools built for me.

Most language tools are built for beginners. Dioma is built for the long stretch in the middle, where you have the basics down, but aren't fluent yet.

At the intermediate level: you can read most of what you pick up, you can follow some conversations, and you can hold your own at a dinner. But the next jump takes forever; the work that used to produce visible progress isn't producing it anymore, and the methods that would actually move you forward (tutoring, in-person classes) are expensive and inflexible in ways that don't fit most adult lives. 

So the months stack up without tangible progress, and the longer that goes on, the more demoralizing it gets.

I tracked my errors by hand for a year. Dioma is what I wish I'd had.

The first time I tried to learn Hebrew, I was nineteen, on a year abroad in Israel. I got to a low intermediate level and then let it go for almost fifteen years. In my late twenties, with a year-long relocation abroad on the horizon, I learned Spanish from scratch and made it to a pretty advanced level over about three years. That gave me a real reference point for what the road actually looks like - what the early breakthroughs feel like, where the work compounds, and what it takes to keep showing up.

I spent fifteen years in consumer goods marketing before this, most of it applying analytical rigor to questions about what people actually do versus what they say they do. So when I started working on my own Hebrew, I looked at it the way I'd look at a business problem: what is the data telling me, and how do I use it to make progress. I tracked my learning intensively, used early AI tools to analyze the patterns in my errors, and worked with my tutor to focus practice on what was actually moving the needle.

I noticed a couple of things on this journey tracking my progress:

It's really hard to get speaking and writing practice. Those are the elements of practice that require feedback, and speaking and writing practice only made up 8-10% of my time.

Monologue practice with AI really helped me build confidence. While it was an imperfect feedback loop, it showed me the potential of real-time feedback.

These two observations led to Dioma. The real challenge for me was how to get more speaking and writing practice and real-time feedback.

So every time you speak or write in Dioma, you get specific feedback that tells you not just that something was wrong, but how to make it better. The results from each session feed the next one. Intermediate and advanced learners already have familiarity with a lot of the language; what they need is targeted practice, and a way to see what's actually moving.

I intentionally didn't design Dioma to be easy or to feel like a game. It's built to give committed learners meaningful results.

I'm still on this journey with you. I take one-on-one lessons with a tutor every week, and I use Dioma to practice in between sessions, and I consume as much native content as I can fit into a week with three kids and a company to build. I built it for me. I think it will help you too.

- Geoff Bloom
Language Learner, and Dioma Founder