Product
English for Tourism, Business and IT lands in Arena
Four English tracks, 17 units and 136 exercises, written for Kyrgyz and Russian speakers and set in Central Asia, are now part of the Learn tab.
Arena now teaches English. The new course sits in the Learn tab between the basics and the build tracks, and it is written for people who think in Kyrgyz or Russian and need English for work.
Four tracks
- Core English (A0 to A2), five units: who you are, numbers and prices, family and home, food and the café, daily routine and "I can".
- English for Tourism, four units: welcoming guests to Kyrgyzstan, directions and transport from the marshrutka to Manas airport, check-in and problems at a guesthouse, and guiding a tour to Ala-Archa, Song-Kul or Burana.
- English for Business, four units: introducing your company, emails that get answers, meetings and deadlines, and a 60-second pitch to investors.
- English for IT, four units: the daily standup, Git and GitHub words, bug reports that get fixed, and talking to a client about scope.
In total: 17 units and 136 exercises.
How a lesson works
Every unit teaches one grammar point through seven or eight exercises of five types: choose the answer, fill the blank, put the words in order, match the pairs, and translate. Instructions appear in the player's own language; the English itself is the same for everyone.
There is no fail-out. A wrong answer shows the right one with a short tip, and the lesson carries on. A combo counter tracks correct answers in a row. Tips use places and prices players know: som, Issyk-Kul, Osh bazaar, Bishkek, Almaty, Tashkent.
A finished unit pays points, 20 for Core and 25 for the professional tracks, and can be shared to the Showcase in one tap. Five medals sit on the English track, up to Polyglot for completing all four.
Why English, and why now
English proficiency in the region is rated "very low": EF ranks Kyrgyzstan 101st, Uzbekistan 104th and Kazakhstan 107th of 123 countries. Remote work, AI tools and most client briefs run in English. A guide who can price a tour, a developer who can write a bug report, a founder who can pitch in a minute: those are the skills that open doors, so those are the units we wrote first.
Before we promote the course widely, a native Kyrgyz editor is reading every prompt.