Fluent in Fifteen: Speak a New Language in 15 Minutes a Day

Deborah Shipley is a linguist, technologist, and the founder of LangFlow, a consultancy that helps multinational organizations implement AI-assisted language training programs for their teams. She holds a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and has spent over fifteen years working at the intersection of language acquisition and artificial intelligence.

Shipley began her career as a language teacher in Tokyo, where she taught English to corporate professionals at Sony and Mitsubishi. It was there that she first observed the gap between traditional language instruction and the real needs of busy professionals. Her students did not lack motivation. They lacked methods that respected the constraints of their schedules. That insight shaped the research agenda she has pursued ever since.

She joined Duolingo in 2015 as a curriculum designer, contributing to the platform's Spanish and French courses during a period of rapid growth. She later moved to DeepL, where she worked on the company's glossary and formal tone features for enterprise users. Her technical background includes several years as a product manager at a speech recognition startup, where she specialized in accent adaptation and non-native speech patterns.

Shipley's writing on language learning technology has appeared in Wired, MIT Technology Review, and the TESOL Quarterly journal. She speaks regularly at industry conferences, including the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon and the annual ACTFL convention. Her TEDx talk, "The Fifteen-Minute Brain: How Short Bursts Reshape Language Learning," has been viewed over two million times.

When she is not working, Shipley is usually learning a language. She speaks French and Japanese at advanced proficiency, is working toward intermediate fluency in Arabic, and has recently begun studying Turkish. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and two cats, both of whom respond only to commands given in French. She maintains an active blog at deborabshipley.com where she shares weekly AI-assisted language learning tips.