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Show HN: Languessr – a game where you guess the language of a Wikipedia article
- hruzgar 3y agothis is actually very fun and addictive lmao
- slater 3y agoGuessed "English" - but the correct answer was "Simple English"! c'moooooon....
- eszed 3y agoAt least as a native speaker, and given a long-enough example, those are (based on a gestalt guess) pretty distinguishable.
- owenpalmer 3y agoYou can basically guess the language based on the script in which it's displayed. It would be better if the language choices were displayed as a translation to your native language. So instead of 日本語 it should just say "Japanese"
- nielsbot 3y agoThere’s an option to display the language names in English
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou would need to know Farsi or Arabic to tell the difference between those.
- dotancohen 3y agoI think that's the idea. Not much different than differentiating e.g. German and Italian as they use mostly the same alphabet. For what it's worth, I can identify Farsi from Arabic as I can read Arabic and Farsi has some additional letters. I suppose that German and Italian would be a similar situation for most HN readers.
- quickthrower2 3y agoLol! > You guessed English (en) but the right answer was Simple English (simple).
- mahmoudhossam 3y agoI got two wrong: guessed Spanish when it was Catalan and Russian when it was Ukrainian.
- YoshiRulz 3y agoDoesn't quite work IMO. What if, rather than getting either full points or nothing, you were scored based on how close your guess was (in terms of language families) and how much text you needed to look at?
- xiupos 3y agoThanks for your comment! I have been troubled by the first opinion, as it is difficult to score "linguistic distance" quantitatively (like GeoGuessr) even in an academic setting. The second opinion is a good idea, and I will add it to my TODO list!
- rabbits_2002 3y agocan you actually distinguish farsi and arabic without speaking one of the languages?
- sneed_chucker 3y agoPresumably if you read a third language written in the Arabic script (e.g. Urdu or Pashto) then you could probably tell them apart without necessarily being able to read either. After all, you can probably tell German and Polish apart without being able to read or speak either one.
- sam_bristow 3y agoPart of me is disappointed this isn't LAN-guesser where you get creds on a random box and have to work out which internal network it is on.