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Show HN: Master Numbers in a Foreign Language

112 points by jasonlfunk 10y ago

jasonlfunk 10y ago
Author here. I'm working on launching a new webapp dedicated to helping language learners master numbers both in production and listening comprehension. I'd love any feedback, tips, or suggestions from the HN community.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Can you add the names of the languages below the flags (probably both in English, and in that language as well)? It's not super easy to scan for the language I'm interested in based on flags alone, assuming I even know what the flag looks like.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Very nice idea. On the main page, consider listing the languages, rather than using flags. Languages and countries don't always correspond one-to-one; many of the flags you have link to the same language, and conversely there are multiple languages spoken in some countries. A language list would be both more compact and more directly convey what people want to look for, rather than making people indirect through "I want to learn more of language X, which of the several countries speaking that language should I select, and does it make a difference?". (That said, if you later expand to cover regional differences in accent, distinguishing between countries seems useful for that.)
  - jasonlfunk 10y ago
    Thanks! Regional dialects and differences in accent would be a great idea. I may end up being limited by the availability of the audio since I'm using a speech synthesis library at the moment. Perhaps some fallback methods of crowd-sourced audio for the less-common dialects would be an option.
- jliechti1 10y ago
  This looks like it will be quite useful for anyone practicing languages that have their own word for 10,000 (Chinese, Japanese, etc), thanks! In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is "10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of 100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    Norwegian has a similar thing, mostly used by older folks. "72" might be "seventy-two" but it is also "two plus seventy."
  - rahimnathwani 10y ago
    Hindi and related languages have the same thing. Lakh is 100k. Crore is 100 lakh.
- JSGraef 10y ago
  This is really cool! When I was learning numbers in another language, I would say license plate numbers out loud (or in my head) each time I saw one. This would have been nice at that time! As a side note, 'Finnish' is misspelled.
- personlurking 10y ago
  I tried the languages I know. Pretty cool! For my next language I'm starting now, this makes me want to start reviewing numbers even though it's not something I generally focus on at first. Suggestion: make the lowest time at least 20 or 30 seconds, as 10 is too short. Second suggestion: a visual component where you could utilize shop signs with prices on them (http://i.imgur.com/wsg5BU4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wsg5BU4.jpg) but I'm not sure how that could benefit the user, maybe the user has to type out the number (like "fifty seven").
- a_c 10y ago
  Great app! Just a nitpick. Seems like China, Hong Kong and Taiwan all have "Chinese" selected. Where the dropdown menu in the freeplay page does have "Chinese Hong Kong" (or is it Cantonese?) provided.
bbcbasic 10y ago
All languages show as unavailable. Android 5.1.0 chrome 56
magic_beans 10y ago
This is amazing! Adding a "years" category would be great too!
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Thanks! Great idea.
madflame991 10y ago
Not all languages in the "Lots of Supported Languages" are actually supported; i.e. Greek, Turkish, Swedish...
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  This! I was pretty excited to see a Norwegian flag on there, as not only do I sometimes not understand numbers, but there are a few different ways to say larger numbers. Click on the link and it is unavailable. I was sorely disappointed.
  - jasonlfunk 10y ago
    Hm, I'll look into it. Right now it is using the built-in SpeechSynthesis library in the browser. You may try installing the language in the accessibility settings for your OS. (Could you try this and let me know?) I've considered adding a fallback API like Google's Cloud API if the browser is unavailable, but I haven't done that yet. If you didn't, be sure to get on the feedback/email list and I'll let you know when I do.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Worked on Firefox on a Mac, but not on Firefox on Android. I get about 40% correct in Norwegian, even though I've never studied the language before, since I'm studying Danish. I only get about 50% right in Danish :-( "tre hundrede seks og halvfjerds"... mad! ("Three hundreds six and half-the-fourth-[multiple-of-twenty]", more-or-less.)
- zero_iq 10y ago
  I'm learning Swedish, so that was the first I tried, and it worked perfectly for me. (Firefox 51.01, MacOS X 10.11)
stoolpigeon 10y ago
Just ran through Hungarian for a bit - lots of fun. Hungarian is easy as the numbering system is super consistent and logical. Though this just covers the cardinal numbers. The other types in Hungarian are quite different.
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Really? Like what, for instance? I know that ordinal numbers are typically different in languages. Are there others?
  - tetromino_ 10y ago
    Don't know about Hungarian, but in Russian I can think of at least four types of numerals: - cardinal (what is the number?); for example, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat' (два, три, четыре, пять) - ordinal (which position in a sequence?); for example, vtoroy, trety, chetvyorty, pyaty (второй, третий, четвёртый, пятый) - collective (how many?); for example, dvoye, troye, chetvero, pyatero (двое, трое, четверо, пятеро) - nominative (what is the number's name?); for example, dvoika, troika, chetvyorka, pyatyorka (двойка, тройка, четвёрка, пятёрка)
    - schoen 10y ago
      In Latin there are cardinals, ordinals, and also distributives, frequentatives, and according to some people multiplicatives (tres, tertius, terni, ter, triplex). Their meanings are something like: three, third, three apiece, thrice, triple These answer questions like: How many apples were there? Which one of the apples did you want? How were the apples distributed to the children? How many times did you count the apples? How has the apple population grown since last year? At least for small numbers, English seems to have a distinctive form for each of these except for the distributive. But Latin will have many of these distinctive forms even for large numbers, like sescenties 'six hundred times' and octingentesimus 'eight hundredth'. Edit: there's also some specialized vocabulary for fractions such as quadrans, sextans, octans, and even specific fractions like dodrans (3/4) and quincunx (5/12). But I'm not sure that these patterns are productive (generalizable) for larger denominators. Per Wikipedia, it looks like they're not, but quite a few have specific names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions (I'd never heard of most of those! ... now I remember learning about the distributives for the first time at a spoken Latin event and remarking that numbers sounded surprisingly complicated in Latin, to which the organizer replied "dimidiam partem nescis!" 'you don't know the half of it!'.)
S4M 10y ago
One trick that helped me to master the numbers in a foreign languages was to mentally make additions in that language. For example, in Japanese, I would ask myself "How much is Ni plus Go?" At first I would mentally do "well, Ni is 2, Go is 5, 2+5=7, 7 is Nana, so that's the answer" and at some point I was able to do it directly without translating the numbers to my native language.
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- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  That's a great idea for an advanced mode. Everyone loves math problems. :)
- Symbiote 10y ago
  My Mandarin teacher did this. The answer was usually 14, 41, 40, 44 or similar. This was because, well: 四是四, sì shì sì 十是十。 shí shì shí 十四是十四, shí sì shì shí sì 四十是四十。 sì shí shì sì shí 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TuVL3mlBR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TuVL3mlBR4
- sdrothrock 10y ago
  The most difficult problem I have with Japanese numbers (going on 13 years of study and ten years in-country) is STILL dealing with counting higher numbers based on 10,000s. I've drilled and practiced and it still doesn't come fluently; I always find myself converting the Japanese to English, doing the math, then reconverting to Japanese, usually using my fingers to tick off zeroes to figure out how many 10,000s the number has.
  - wapz 10y ago
    The times I count higher than 1,000 in Japanese is almost always currency. I think in USD and yen, so if I say 一万円 I think either "ichimanen" or $100. When I have to translate a big number like 54万円 I just tell them $5400. It's surely not as good as properly learning but it just takes so much longer when translating live.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
This is very cool. And it has Korean. When I tried to do Korean in Rosetta Stone, numbers are where I dropped off. With that said, it would be nice if there were a learning mode for people who don't know the numbers to learn them through this.
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  I am planning to add this! If you are interested, be sure to get on the list to know when it's released.
- sevensor 10y ago
  Korean has two sets of numbers! (Il, e, sam... and hana, dul, set, ... ). When I worked for a Korean company, I heard the first more than the second, but I could never work out what the right context was for each set of numbers. I could usually pick out the numbers up to 20 or so, which was all I really needed in a work context.
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shdon 10y ago
Mine only shows "American" on Firefox, plenty of other languages on Chrome, both on Windows 10. Why the discrepancy?
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  I'm not sure exactly. It is currently using the browser's speech synthesis functionality. I think Chrome has some languages shipped with it while Firefox may rely solely on the OS. I will probably need to switch away from the browser to get a consistent experience.
  - matt_morgan 10y ago
    FF on Fedora 25 showed lots of languages, FYI.
- panglott 10y ago
  My Firefox on Windows shows no languages available, as does Edge on Windows, while Chrome on Windows shows a handful of languages available. Edit to say: what a fantastic and useful little tool! It is small focused, and very useful.
lawn 10y ago
Hmm everything I try is unavailable. Tried on firefox and chromium. Is the site overloaded or is it something on my end?
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  It's probably on your end as the voice is done in the browser. Which OS are you on? The browsers may require some OS functionality for the speech synthesis to work.
  - lawn 10y ago
    Slackware, firefox 51.0.1.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      For Firefox on Linux you need to install a speech synthesis engine such as espeak
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Same for me FF on Kubuntu, tried Chromium too. Did work on Chrome - two problems: one was a sound cut off before the end and so I entered the wrong number; second the last number read finished the game but without any time for entering the number, it deducted a mark. A further game (different language) ended before I finished and didn't tell me the last answer.
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whelchel 10y ago
This is great! Bookmarked. Numbers are rattled off so quickly in foreign languages, and small syntax differences where the order is changed and really cause new learners to pause and miss the complete rest of the sentence etc.
officemonkey 10y ago
One day, during a multi-hour car-ride, I drilled my wife on French numbers by reading off the license plates we saw. She would translate two and three digits. Her instructor said she had never seen someone improve so fast.
3pt14159 10y ago
Wow, this is actually really good. Thank you! This will help immensely for my Russian. Any plans for ads or monetization, or are you just going to keep it as a free thing?
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orless 10y ago
I love German language, but one thing totally freaks me out is that in German numbers between 21 and 99 are pronounced "backwards". That is, 21 is "einundzwanzig" - "one and twenty". I speak German for somewhat 15 years already, but every time I have to deal with numbers below 100, I freeze for a couple of seconds.
- andreasklinger 10y ago
  same here in german: when (for whatever reason) people dictate numbers i always insist on single digit dictation my brain cant handle long series of "twoandtwenty, threeandforty"
- douche 10y ago
  Try French, where you eventually have to start doing addition, multiplication, or both... Quatre-vingt-douze = four times twenty plus twelve = 92
  - bad_login 10y ago
    Yes, but belgium and switzerland doesn't: France, belgium/switzerland 70 -> soixante dix (60 + 10) -> septant (latin word like september for 7) 80 -> quate vingt (4 * 20) -> octant/huitant (come from huit = 8) 90 -> quatre vingt dix (4 * 20 + 10) -> nonant (latin word for 9)
- lillesvin 10y ago
  It's the same in Danish. And it repeats (in German too) for every 100, so you get "einhunderteinundzwanzig" in German or "(et) hundrede enogtyve" in Danish. I imagine it can really trip you up with large numbers that are usually grouped by thousands, millions, billion, etc. when saying them out loud, like 123456789: "hundrede og treogtyve millioner, fire hundrede seksoghalvtreds tusinde og syv hundrede niogfirs", literally: "one hundred and three-and-twenty million, four hundred six-and-fifty thousand and seven hundred nine-and-eighty". And Danish has yet another quirk. The names for 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 aren' based on multiplication with 10 but on multiplication with 20, so instead of saying something to the effect of "five-tens" we say "half-third (i.e. 2.5) times 20", and then we even go and shorten it to obscure the fact that it's based on 20-multiplication. I envy no one who has to learn Danish numerals.
uses 10y ago
Sometimes when I click Replay, it autofails me and moves to the next question.
martalist 10y ago
Your Australian voice is decidedly British.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  The Australian voice is definitely Australian, and the British, British, for me. I'm British. Are you British or Australian? I've found Americans often confuse us.
  - schoen 10y ago
    It's using browser speech synthesis rather than a recording, so the voice could be different from browser to browser and OS to OS!
toomanybeersies 10y ago
It was interesting when I was in Vietnam recently, a lot of Vietnamese people I dealt with outside the cities didn't speak any English at all, except for numbers, or at least pretended as much. It seems a bit backwards really. It's easy to write down numbers (which they often did, or they showed me the cash I had to pay). Conveniently the motorbike mechanics are usually so good you just point at what's wrong and they'll figure it out pretty quickly.
imranq 10y ago
This is great! But I couldn't find any way to learn visually?
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Yep, I plan to add this functionality soon.
alister 10y ago
For anyone who hasn't studied a foreign language extensively, you might be surprised to learn that numbers are much more difficult than your intuition would suggest. You might think, what's the big deal? You need memorize around 40 words (i.e., the words for 0-9, 10-19, 20, 30, ..., 90, 100, 1000, million, etc.), plus a few rules, and then practice until you're fast. I want to point out some difficulties that people learning English encounter. Every foreign language will have its own anomalies. - In English, a year like 1776 is spoken as 17-76, not as one thousand seven hundred seventy six. And if you say it the long way, a native English speaker might even get a little thrown off. - As an exception to the above, a year like 2001, is spoken as two thousand and one, not as 20-01. - As an exception to the exception above, a year like 1701 is spoken as 17-oh-1, and not the long way. - Times like 3:45 are spoken in numerous ways, like 3-45, quarter to 4, 15-45 if afternoon, or possibly even 15 to 4. - When giving an address, 386 Maple is said as 3-86 Maple, not as 3-8-6 nor the long the way. - You need to learn fractions and ordinal numbers: half, one-third, an-eighth, etc. You eat a third of a cake on the third floor, but half a cake on the second floor; i.e., different words in the case of number 2 (half vs second). - When speaking a series of digits, 0 can be said as oh or zero; in many contexts, oh is much more common. - Other exceptions and special cases with dates, prices, decimal points, measurements, ...
- flukus 10y ago
  So it's not just programmers that have a hard time with dates/times, it's the entire human race.
- ramkarthikk 10y ago
  This is great. Since we speak the language every day (even though I'm not a native speaker), we do not see the minute details of it. I could think of one more. 308 - Lot of people pronounce it as 3-naught-8. When we see a score, 1-0, we say 1 - NIL. 0 is complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_Engl...
  - schoen 10y ago
    Those examples also show regional variation: in most forms of U.S. English "naught" and "nil" are almost unheard of today and those examples would be "3-oh-8" and "1-zero" (or "1-nothing" or "1-oh", or maybe some other variants that would probably be marked as humorous or satirical like "zip" or "zilch").
pawelwentpawel 10y ago
Nice one, bookmarked :) I'm trying it out now and one thing is a bit annoying - the track for the number is played immediately as I press the "guess" button for the previous one.
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Yeah, it does. Do you think a short delay might be help?
polemic 10y ago
Btw, misspelt "Finnish" as "Finish" in multiple locations.
floatas 10y ago
I entered 890 when correct answer was 89. 89 is all shown in green at the end and its hard to know which ones I got wrong. Other than that, really fun to play.
wingerlang 10y ago
Cool, will be using it for Thai now. So far so good.

112 points by jasonlfunk 10y ago

Author here. I'm working on launching a new webapp dedicated to helping language learners master numbers both in production and listening comprehension. I'd love any feedback, tips, or suggestions from the HN community.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
Can you add the names of the languages below the flags (probably both in English, and in that language as well)? It's not super easy to scan for the language I'm interested in based on flags alone, assuming I even know what the flag looks like.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Very nice idea. On the main page, consider listing the languages, rather than using flags. Languages and countries don't always correspond one-to-one; many of the flags you have link to the same language, and conversely there are multiple languages spoken in some countries. A language list would be both more compact and more directly convey what people want to look for, rather than making people indirect through "I want to learn more of language X, which of the several countries speaking that language should I select, and does it make a difference?". (That said, if you later expand to cover regional differences in accent, distinguishing between countries seems useful for that.)
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Thanks! Regional dialects and differences in accent would be a great idea. I may end up being limited by the availability of the audio since I'm using a speech synthesis library at the moment. Perhaps some fallback methods of crowd-sourced audio for the less-common dialects would be an option.
jliechti1 10y ago
This looks like it will be quite useful for anyone practicing languages that have their own word for 10,000 (Chinese, Japanese, etc), thanks! In Chinese, the number "100,000" is not read as "100 thousand", rather it is "10 ten-thousands". This makes translating numbers in the range of 100,000-10,000,000 a bit awkward if you are not used to it.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Norwegian has a similar thing, mostly used by older folks. "72" might be "seventy-two" but it is also "two plus seventy."
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  Hindi and related languages have the same thing. Lakh is 100k. Crore is 100 lakh.
JSGraef 10y ago
This is really cool! When I was learning numbers in another language, I would say license plate numbers out loud (or in my head) each time I saw one. This would have been nice at that time! As a side note, 'Finnish' is misspelled.
personlurking 10y ago
I tried the languages I know. Pretty cool! For my next language I'm starting now, this makes me want to start reviewing numbers even though it's not something I generally focus on at first. Suggestion: make the lowest time at least 20 or 30 seconds, as 10 is too short. Second suggestion: a visual component where you could utilize shop signs with prices on them (http://i.imgur.com/wsg5BU4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wsg5BU4.jpg) but I'm not sure how that could benefit the user, maybe the user has to type out the number (like "fifty seven").
a_c 10y ago
Great app! Just a nitpick. Seems like China, Hong Kong and Taiwan all have "Chinese" selected. Where the dropdown menu in the freeplay page does have "Chinese Hong Kong" (or is it Cantonese?) provided.

bbcbasic 10y ago

All languages show as unavailable. Android 5.1.0 chrome 56

magic_beans 10y ago

This is amazing! Adding a "years" category would be great too!

jasonlfunk 10y ago
Thanks! Great idea.

madflame991 10y ago

Not all languages in the "Lots of Supported Languages" are actually supported; i.e. Greek, Turkish, Swedish...

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
This! I was pretty excited to see a Norwegian flag on there, as not only do I sometimes not understand numbers, but there are a few different ways to say larger numbers. Click on the link and it is unavailable. I was sorely disappointed.
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  Hm, I'll look into it. Right now it is using the built-in SpeechSynthesis library in the browser. You may try installing the language in the accessibility settings for your OS. (Could you try this and let me know?) I've considered adding a fallback API like Google's Cloud API if the browser is unavailable, but I haven't done that yet. If you didn't, be sure to get on the feedback/email list and I'll let you know when I do.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Worked on Firefox on a Mac, but not on Firefox on Android. I get about 40% correct in Norwegian, even though I've never studied the language before, since I'm studying Danish. I only get about 50% right in Danish :-( "tre hundrede seks og halvfjerds"... mad! ("Three hundreds six and half-the-fourth-[multiple-of-twenty]", more-or-less.)
zero_iq 10y ago
I'm learning Swedish, so that was the first I tried, and it worked perfectly for me. (Firefox 51.01, MacOS X 10.11)

stoolpigeon 10y ago

Just ran through Hungarian for a bit - lots of fun. Hungarian is easy as the numbering system is super consistent and logical. Though this just covers the cardinal numbers. The other types in Hungarian are quite different.

jasonlfunk 10y ago
Really? Like what, for instance? I know that ordinal numbers are typically different in languages. Are there others?
- tetromino_ 10y ago
  Don't know about Hungarian, but in Russian I can think of at least four types of numerals: - cardinal (what is the number?); for example, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat' (два, три, четыре, пять) - ordinal (which position in a sequence?); for example, vtoroy, trety, chetvyorty, pyaty (второй, третий, четвёртый, пятый) - collective (how many?); for example, dvoye, troye, chetvero, pyatero (двое, трое, четверо, пятеро) - nominative (what is the number's name?); for example, dvoika, troika, chetvyorka, pyatyorka (двойка, тройка, четвёрка, пятёрка)
  - schoen 10y ago
    In Latin there are cardinals, ordinals, and also distributives, frequentatives, and according to some people multiplicatives (tres, tertius, terni, ter, triplex). Their meanings are something like: three, third, three apiece, thrice, triple These answer questions like: How many apples were there? Which one of the apples did you want? How were the apples distributed to the children? How many times did you count the apples? How has the apple population grown since last year? At least for small numbers, English seems to have a distinctive form for each of these except for the distributive. But Latin will have many of these distinctive forms even for large numbers, like sescenties 'six hundred times' and octingentesimus 'eight hundredth'. Edit: there's also some specialized vocabulary for fractions such as quadrans, sextans, octans, and even specific fractions like dodrans (3/4) and quincunx (5/12). But I'm not sure that these patterns are productive (generalizable) for larger denominators. Per Wikipedia, it looks like they're not, but quite a few have specific names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions (I'd never heard of most of those! ... now I remember learning about the distributives for the first time at a spoken Latin event and remarking that numbers sounded surprisingly complicated in Latin, to which the organizer replied "dimidiam partem nescis!" 'you don't know the half of it!'.)

S4M 10y ago

One trick that helped me to master the numbers in a foreign languages was to mentally make additions in that language. For example, in Japanese, I would ask myself "How much is Ni plus Go?" At first I would mentally do "well, Ni is 2, Go is 5, 2+5=7, 7 is Nana, so that's the answer" and at some point I was able to do it directly without translating the numbers to my native language.

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jasonlfunk 10y ago
That's a great idea for an advanced mode. Everyone loves math problems. :)
Symbiote 10y ago
My Mandarin teacher did this. The answer was usually 14, 41, 40, 44 or similar. This was because, well: 四是四, sì shì sì 十是十。 shí shì shí 十四是十四, shí sì shì shí sì 四十是四十。 sì shí shì sì shí 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TuVL3mlBR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TuVL3mlBR4
sdrothrock 10y ago
The most difficult problem I have with Japanese numbers (going on 13 years of study and ten years in-country) is STILL dealing with counting higher numbers based on 10,000s. I've drilled and practiced and it still doesn't come fluently; I always find myself converting the Japanese to English, doing the math, then reconverting to Japanese, usually using my fingers to tick off zeroes to figure out how many 10,000s the number has.
- wapz 10y ago
  The times I count higher than 1,000 in Japanese is almost always currency. I think in USD and yen, so if I say 一万円 I think either "ichimanen" or $100. When I have to translate a big number like 54万円 I just tell them $5400. It's surely not as good as properly learning but it just takes so much longer when translating live.

throwaway2016a 10y ago

This is very cool. And it has Korean. When I tried to do Korean in Rosetta Stone, numbers are where I dropped off. With that said, it would be nice if there were a learning mode for people who don't know the numbers to learn them through this.

jasonlfunk 10y ago
I am planning to add this! If you are interested, be sure to get on the list to know when it's released.
sevensor 10y ago
Korean has two sets of numbers! (Il, e, sam... and hana, dul, set, ... ). When I worked for a Korean company, I heard the first more than the second, but I could never work out what the right context was for each set of numbers. I could usually pick out the numbers up to 20 or so, which was all I really needed in a work context.

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shdon 10y ago

Mine only shows "American" on Firefox, plenty of other languages on Chrome, both on Windows 10. Why the discrepancy?

jasonlfunk 10y ago
I'm not sure exactly. It is currently using the browser's speech synthesis functionality. I think Chrome has some languages shipped with it while Firefox may rely solely on the OS. I will probably need to switch away from the browser to get a consistent experience.
- matt_morgan 10y ago
  FF on Fedora 25 showed lots of languages, FYI.
panglott 10y ago
My Firefox on Windows shows no languages available, as does Edge on Windows, while Chrome on Windows shows a handful of languages available. Edit to say: what a fantastic and useful little tool! It is small focused, and very useful.

lawn 10y ago

Hmm everything I try is unavailable. Tried on firefox and chromium. Is the site overloaded or is it something on my end?

jasonlfunk 10y ago
It's probably on your end as the voice is done in the browser. Which OS are you on? The browsers may require some OS functionality for the speech synthesis to work.
- lawn 10y ago
  Slackware, firefox 51.0.1.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    For Firefox on Linux you need to install a speech synthesis engine such as espeak
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Same for me FF on Kubuntu, tried Chromium too. Did work on Chrome - two problems: one was a sound cut off before the end and so I entered the wrong number; second the last number read finished the game but without any time for entering the number, it deducted a mark. A further game (different language) ended before I finished and didn't tell me the last answer.
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whelchel 10y ago

This is great! Bookmarked. Numbers are rattled off so quickly in foreign languages, and small syntax differences where the order is changed and really cause new learners to pause and miss the complete rest of the sentence etc.

officemonkey 10y ago

One day, during a multi-hour car-ride, I drilled my wife on French numbers by reading off the license plates we saw. She would translate two and three digits. Her instructor said she had never seen someone improve so fast.

3pt14159 10y ago

Wow, this is actually really good. Thank you! This will help immensely for my Russian. Any plans for ads or monetization, or are you just going to keep it as a free thing?

deleted 10y ago

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orless 10y ago

I love German language, but one thing totally freaks me out is that in German numbers between 21 and 99 are pronounced "backwards". That is, 21 is "einundzwanzig" - "one and twenty". I speak German for somewhat 15 years already, but every time I have to deal with numbers below 100, I freeze for a couple of seconds.

andreasklinger 10y ago
same here in german: when (for whatever reason) people dictate numbers i always insist on single digit dictation my brain cant handle long series of "twoandtwenty, threeandforty"
douche 10y ago
Try French, where you eventually have to start doing addition, multiplication, or both... Quatre-vingt-douze = four times twenty plus twelve = 92
- bad_login 10y ago
  Yes, but belgium and switzerland doesn't: France, belgium/switzerland 70 -> soixante dix (60 + 10) -> septant (latin word like september for 7) 80 -> quate vingt (4 * 20) -> octant/huitant (come from huit = 8) 90 -> quatre vingt dix (4 * 20 + 10) -> nonant (latin word for 9)
lillesvin 10y ago
It's the same in Danish. And it repeats (in German too) for every 100, so you get "einhunderteinundzwanzig" in German or "(et) hundrede enogtyve" in Danish. I imagine it can really trip you up with large numbers that are usually grouped by thousands, millions, billion, etc. when saying them out loud, like 123456789: "hundrede og treogtyve millioner, fire hundrede seksoghalvtreds tusinde og syv hundrede niogfirs", literally: "one hundred and three-and-twenty million, four hundred six-and-fifty thousand and seven hundred nine-and-eighty". And Danish has yet another quirk. The names for 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 aren' based on multiplication with 10 but on multiplication with 20, so instead of saying something to the effect of "five-tens" we say "half-third (i.e. 2.5) times 20", and then we even go and shorten it to obscure the fact that it's based on 20-multiplication. I envy no one who has to learn Danish numerals.

uses 10y ago

Sometimes when I click Replay, it autofails me and moves to the next question.

martalist 10y ago

Your Australian voice is decidedly British.

Symbiote 10y ago
The Australian voice is definitely Australian, and the British, British, for me. I'm British. Are you British or Australian? I've found Americans often confuse us.
- schoen 10y ago
  It's using browser speech synthesis rather than a recording, so the voice could be different from browser to browser and OS to OS!

toomanybeersies 10y ago

It was interesting when I was in Vietnam recently, a lot of Vietnamese people I dealt with outside the cities didn't speak any English at all, except for numbers, or at least pretended as much. It seems a bit backwards really. It's easy to write down numbers (which they often did, or they showed me the cash I had to pay). Conveniently the motorbike mechanics are usually so good you just point at what's wrong and they'll figure it out pretty quickly.

imranq 10y ago

This is great! But I couldn't find any way to learn visually?

jasonlfunk 10y ago
Yep, I plan to add this functionality soon.

alister 10y ago

For anyone who hasn't studied a foreign language extensively, you might be surprised to learn that numbers are much more difficult than your intuition would suggest. You might think, what's the big deal? You need memorize around 40 words (i.e., the words for 0-9, 10-19, 20, 30, ..., 90, 100, 1000, million, etc.), plus a few rules, and then practice until you're fast. I want to point out some difficulties that people learning English encounter. Every foreign language will have its own anomalies. - In English, a year like 1776 is spoken as 17-76, not as one thousand seven hundred seventy six. And if you say it the long way, a native English speaker might even get a little thrown off. - As an exception to the above, a year like 2001, is spoken as two thousand and one, not as 20-01. - As an exception to the exception above, a year like 1701 is spoken as 17-oh-1, and not the long way. - Times like 3:45 are spoken in numerous ways, like 3-45, quarter to 4, 15-45 if afternoon, or possibly even 15 to 4. - When giving an address, 386 Maple is said as 3-86 Maple, not as 3-8-6 nor the long the way. - You need to learn fractions and ordinal numbers: half, one-third, an-eighth, etc. You eat a third of a cake on the third floor, but half a cake on the second floor; i.e., different words in the case of number 2 (half vs second). - When speaking a series of digits, 0 can be said as oh or zero; in many contexts, oh is much more common. - Other exceptions and special cases with dates, prices, decimal points, measurements, ...

flukus 10y ago
So it's not just programmers that have a hard time with dates/times, it's the entire human race.
ramkarthikk 10y ago
This is great. Since we speak the language every day (even though I'm not a native speaker), we do not see the minute details of it. I could think of one more. 308 - Lot of people pronounce it as 3-naught-8. When we see a score, 1-0, we say 1 - NIL. 0 is complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_number_0_in_Engl...
- schoen 10y ago
  Those examples also show regional variation: in most forms of U.S. English "naught" and "nil" are almost unheard of today and those examples would be "3-oh-8" and "1-zero" (or "1-nothing" or "1-oh", or maybe some other variants that would probably be marked as humorous or satirical like "zip" or "zilch").

pawelwentpawel 10y ago

Nice one, bookmarked :) I'm trying it out now and one thing is a bit annoying - the track for the number is played immediately as I press the "guess" button for the previous one.

jasonlfunk 10y ago
Yeah, it does. Do you think a short delay might be help?

polemic 10y ago

Btw, misspelt "Finnish" as "Finish" in multiple locations.

floatas 10y ago

I entered 890 when correct answer was 89. 89 is all shown in green at the end and its hard to know which ones I got wrong. Other than that, really fun to play.

wingerlang 10y ago

Cool, will be using it for Thai now. So far so good.