Technology for Learning Any Language

Third Ear Publishing Ltd.

Chris Lonsdale has for the last 15 years been personally involved in building one of the world’s most forward looking language learning companies. Third Ear Publishing Ltd. was established after he published “The Third Ear – You CAN Learn ANY Language”, with purpose of widely popularising accelerated learning technologies for second language learning.

The companies first products were a series of language courses put to music, for learning Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. The series, going by the series title of Rhythmic became a best seller in Hong Kong and was featured for many years as a part of Cathay Pacific’s in-flight entertainment programme.

In 2010 Third Ear Publishing and its China Partner launched an iOS based learning App designed to help Chinese speakers learn English. Kungfu English （功夫英语 quickly became the number one top grossing App on Apple’s China App Store. In 2018 the company released a completely revamped course – including the App and online language parenting – designed specifically around key elements of how the human brain learns language. Kungfu English consistently gets ratings on the App Store above 4.6

Language Parent and Speech Genie

In late 2025 Chris joined forces with John Ball. The two are working together to integrate Cognitive AI developed by John Ball with Chris’s brain-based learning technology to create an AI based language learning product that ultimately will allow anybody body in the world to learn any new language easily, effectively and very quickly.

The name of the new product is Speech Genie, and it’s currently in the pre-launch phase of a Kickstarter campaign. This new product is fully interactive, and focuses on helping learners master meaning – step-by-step – the way the brain is supposed to learn a new language. The language AI based on John Ball’s PATOM theory ensures tight coupling with course materials because PATOM theory based linguistic AI is designed to understand meaning in a way which emulates how humans understand meaning.

This tight coupling allows the AI based learning system to communicate effectively with learners in the target language, ensuring that the language used is always comprehensible. In this way the AI driven “language partner” effectively becomes what I call a Language Parent.