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The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
- tokenadult 13y agoFun! I got a score of 650. It got hard once there were five languages to choose from, and I had studied none of them.
- adamnemecek 13y agoOr have ever heard of some of them. I got actually the exact same score.
- lars512 13y agoHi guys, I'm the author. Here's a related blog post I did introducing the game: http://quietlyamused.org/blog/2013/09/01/introducing-the-great-language-game/ http://quietlyamused.org/blog/2013/09/01/introducing-the-gre... Feedback's much appreciated, and if you encounter any bugs, please report them via email to lars+glg@yencken.org If there's a language you'd like to see that's missing, consider helping out by finding some good quality language samples or news podcasts in that language and emailing me. Enjoy!
- gamegoblin 13y agoI encountered a whole lot of lag. Some buttons took 5+ seconds to respond.
- lars512 13y agoYeah, sorry about that. I'd planned a little more infrastructure work before submitting it to HN. Wish me luck :)
- sillysaurus2 13y agoGood luck!
- richo 13y agoI hope we've learned a valuable lesson about deserting ops teams today.
- lars512 13y agoFirst db switchover has occurred, so far so good.
- nkoren 13y agoInfrastructure is good, but some of the lag could be fixed with code. For example: the page should already know whether a given answer is correct, and give a response without needing to hit the server at all. This would give you instantaneous feedback, which the user can digest while the next audio file is cached. As it is, having to wait 5-10 seconds for my button-presses to register is really killing the enjoyability of what is otherwise a very cool concept.
- benaiah 13y agoYou don't want the correct answer on the client before the answer is submitted - it would be trivial to cheat by extracting the answer with a little bit of reverse engineering.
- lars512 13y agoTry it again today, when the servers are actually running smoothly. You'll find the experience different.
- ivanhoe 13y agoyou could just add some simple loading animation gif, to make it clear that buttons are working...
- kbaker 13y agoCool game, and nicely presented! I got a 250, then 400. It might be good to ask the user where they are from (non-intrusively of course, maybe a simple country selector or IP lookup) to get another dimension on the statistics. Or what languages they already know as well might be interesting when looking at the results.
- lars512 13y agoI'm recording GeoIP country and the Accept-Languages header from their request. Hopefully this generates some interesting data to pore over later. Monthly data snapshots might be useful for researchers.
- beambot 13y agoShowing a distribution of scores would be cool too. EDIT: D'oh. Just saw the "stats" link. Would still be nice to see a distribution of scores.
- peeters 13y agoA cool game worth a couple of plays. I found myself often making educated guesses based on the speaker's accent, not the language itself (i.e. I thought of where I'd think the person was from if the same speaker was speaking English). A suggestion: I really don't like the design of having the next question be a new browser history entry. It took me about 20 back clicks to get back to HN to post this comment.
- prawn 13y agoMight be cool to weight scores per round based on speed of selection. That will, however, favour even more those who get easy combos or languages. French, Thai, Arabic, Cantonese, Italian, etc are all very easy when compared with differentiation between Yugoslavian languages or guessing some that I either hadn't heard of (Kannada) or I'm much less familiar with (Scandinavian).
- troels 13y agoYeah, the Kannada one tripped me up too. I figured it must've been some inuit language - Only afterwards did I realise it's an Indian language (No, the other kind of indians). And good luck distinguishing between scandinavian languages if you're not native. I'm Danish and I sometimes confuse Swedish with Norwegian.
- lake99 13y agoI don't know how much of an exposure you have to various cultures, but I hope you keep in mind that many Indians find it offensive when you call them "the other kind of indians". I'll put it in a manner you can understand. I see that you're Dane. I suppose the US has a significant populace with Danish ancestry. How would you like it if they refer to you as the other kind of Dane. I've also come across anecdotes where Brits visiting the US were told by some rude people to learn to speak English properly.
- jessaustin 13y ago...the other kind of indians. In an American context, it is understandable to think "Indian" signifies "American Indian". Now that East Indian immigration verges on outnumbering American Indians, that will probably change, but it's pretty silly to get offended by historical geographical misunderstandings. I mean, let's vilify Columbus for the right reasons. Besides, what's wrong with Native Americans? Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them? It's not like someone called you "French". b^) ...learn to speak English properly. It is a truth universally acknowledged among speakers of English who've spoken with many other speakers of English, that the worst English-speakers are the English. I find the Irish to be the most intelligible and melodious, especially those Irish who have lived overseas. "BBC" English, however, is not the way that most English people speak, and besides the UK has no monopoly on that dialect.
- busterarm 13y agoI LOVE this. This is something I've been doing on my own for most of my life. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at picking out what languages people are speaking but Dinka is really hard. Distinguishing between some of the Balkan languages is harder than I remember. It's be great if there were an iOS app of this. You'd easily get my $2. :)
- lars512 13y agoThanks for the support! I'll definitely have a think about it. I'd have to collect my own sound samples to make a commercial product, but it's an interesting option.
- personlurking 13y agoCool game! Reminds me of Omniglot's language quizes http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=9100 http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=9100 700 here.
- akamaka 13y agoGreat idea, and very fun! I'd love to see a couple of adjustments: First, the scores right now aren't very meaningful. The chance of winning each round is highly dependent on being lucky with the multiple choices (e.g. I'll always be able to guess Spanish vs. anything else, but my if options are two African languages, it's a coin toss). I think the distribution of scores over several games will end up being similar to playing a series of random coin tosses. My own scores varied greatly. Second, it would be great to have more clips of each language, without having the same person speaking twice. The educational element of the game gets lost when you start overtraining on the same clip.
- rmc 13y agoSecond, it would be great to have more clips of each language, without having the same person speaking twice. The educational element of the game gets lost when you start overtraining on the same clip. Exactly! I got Swedish vs. some Asian language once, correctly guessed swedish and then the next round was the same audio clip and some other languages. The game had told me that it was swedish already, so it was easy.
- lars512 13y agoOn the first point, the game's randomness is biased towards easier languages earlier, and harder languages later. But I didn't want to bring with me a preconceived notion of what languages people would find hard. If you were to track your maximum score, you'd probably find it trend upwards as you trained. So scores are still useful in that regard. On the second point -- I completely agree. Validating the samples takes time, but I promise I'll add more as soon as I can. Thanks for playing :)
- stewbrew 13y agoGreat idea. It would be nice to see a chart with the distribution of scores though or at least the quartiles next to the high score.
- mrich 13y agoGreat! One suggestion: Add a wikipedia link to the language that is displayed when the player gets it wrong, that way you can quickly read up on where it is spoken etc.
- unhammer 13y agoActually, after each try you could have a snippet about each language, e.g. Kannada Primarily spoken in: India # of speakers: 38 million Language family: Dravidian Writing sample: ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ಬರೆಯಿರಿ Is awesome because: Reduplication! You write the word twice, replacing the start of the second one with 'gi-', to get "and related things". So if "books" is 'pustaka', "books and related things" is 'pustaka-gistaka'. Awesome. You get the writing sample from ka.wikipedia.org, and the awesomeness from places like http://wals.info/ http://wals.info/ , http://www.ethnologue.com/ http://www.ethnologue.com/ , http://omniglot.com/ http://omniglot.com/ (or just searching google scholar for the language name and clicking random articles, always fun)
- tripzilch 13y agoOh that's a great idea, very educational and I'd love reading stuff like that while playing this game! (Especially since you have to wait quite a bit before the next sample loads. Which, as some others have pointed out, shouldn't have to be that slow. How many minutes of audio does this game have in total? I think using a modern codec (say OGG or AAC, not MP3) you could go with a pretty low bitrate (VBR), would it be feasible to just load all the clips in one chunk and play slices of that?) Another idea for extra information: show on a world/continent map where this language is spoken. I expected to do really bad at this game since I am awfully bad at geography. But it turns out I'm doing pretty good (15/15, still got 3 lives, but I'm taking a break), since I'm pretty good with language I guess (even though I only speak NL/EN/DE and a bit FR), I know enough about others to make an educated guess. And of course you don't need to know where something is to guess the language :) Seriously, ask me to point those places on a map and I'd fail miserably--hence showing the location(s) where it's spoken would be a welcome training for me :) To the maker of this game: great work! Love it!
- morgante 13y agoDefinitely a very cool concept, but the code could be improved a bit. I'd ideally like to see something like this primarily to be run via Javascript. Then once you guess it'd just download a new audio clip + the correct answer... way less lag.
- lars512 13y agoThe site was quite degraded -- try it again now.
- radikal_shit 13y agoHi, great game. A little suggestion. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages are too similar to differentiate for non native speakers. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian. Basically, the division is more political than linguistical.
- rmc 13y agoA language is a dialect with an army.
- DominikR 13y agoDepending on region, it's even hard to differentiate for a native speaker. (I am a native Serbo-Croatian speaker) Anyways - great game!
- mutation 13y ago(Disclaimer: I am a native croatian speaker.) There's a significant difference between croatian and serbian language: croatian language is composed of three dialects and a standard language which are not found in serbian. It was a political movement to merge one of those dialects (shtokavian) with serbian language. So, serbian is somewhat similar to shtokavian but not to other dialects that compose the rest of the croatian language.
- bojan 13y agoI, as a native Serbian speaker, have a 100% understanding of what is being said on Croatian national TV, and 100% understanding when reading websites in Croatian. While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.
- hsuresh 13y agoGreat game! Found a bug though. When the game is over, if you hit the browser back button, it will let you continue the game.
- lars512 13y agoThanks for reporting it, I'll take a look.
- stordoff 13y agoI hit next twice after guessing correctly, which triggered a Python KeyError. Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe
- asolove 13y agoOne way to make the game harder is to remove clips that have obvious references to proper nouns tied to one country. Many of my correct answers came from hearing the name of a person or place associated with one of the languages.
- lars512 13y agoI try to eliminate these cases. If you notice one, email me with the language it was and I'll fix it.
- rootbear 13y agoThat was fun! I got 300. I only speak English fluently, although I've studied French and German. However, I am very interested in phonetics and have read up on the sound systems of lots of languages and that helped a lot. Thanks, I plan to play it again.
- malkia 13y agoThank you! I think I was lucky, being bulgarian and knowing how most of slavanian languages sound like. Also I can very easily distinguish between non-slavanian west-european ones (french, german, italian, spanish, portuguese). My only advice is to avoid having the same language, or at least same wave file being played twice in a row (It happened few times with me, and I've played it for 5 times in a row). Also maybe introduce something like in the TV shows, where you can get use "jokers" (hints) such as - remove half of the languages that are not (when there are more than 4 or 5 I guess), etc. Or maybe let the player risk, by asking for more languages even on lower levels, but for more points. It's entertaining :) I was actually thinking if you are in the car, and listening to this as a game how would one be able to answer (google glass with eye tracking?), or maybe that's just bad idea for driving.
- clueless123 13y agoWhere can we see the list of all the languages available? Is Quechua available? (Peruvian/Bolivian and the incas native language )
- lars512 13y agoI'll have to make a page showing the available languages. Are you a Quechua speaker? I'd love to add it.
- clueless123 13y agoNot quite, I can barely dabble a few words but it is widely spoken here in Peru. here is a link of a youtube where it is spoken clearly (maybe you can use that ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjTi4q_kIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjTi4q_kIo
- alagappanr 13y agoYou are directly sending a POST request to the {domain}/play/ URL I presume. I gave the URL to my friend and it gave him a 405 Method Not Allowed error.
- lars512 13y agoYeah, I can see how that would be annoying. I'll redirect GET requests to /play/ back to the homepage. Thanks for the heads up!
- gamegoblin 13y agoOne can do surprisingly well by knowing the geographic region a language is spoken, and imagining the accent of people from there, then matching it to the accent of the person speaking.
- prawn 13y agoIf you cop Assyrian vs Turkish first up, you might be flipping a coin quite early. I had two situations like that which chewed lives from the start! The other was Macedonian vs Serbian!
- jdjb 13y agoI clicked the link thinking it would be code examples and I had to guess the programming language...
- royalghost 13y agoExactly, thats what I thought too!
- jmhain 13y agoMaybe it's just a weird coincidence but I've gotten Hebrew about half the time.
- Twisol 13y agoNice! I noticed that I tended to identify the languages by their "fingerprint", certain phonemes and accents that characterize the language. It's probably not surprising that all three languages I missed were African languages. I've heard plenty of European and Asian languages, but rarely have I heard an African language.
- nemothekid 13y agoSame here, scored about 750 just by simplifying knowing kurdish was persian, so to listen for "indian" sounds, or Slovenia by listening for "eastern europe" The only languages I can actually speak are English, and a little French.
- busterarm 13y agoI've been playing this game on my own now for decades...just trying to guess what language people are speaking eavesdropping on conversations and listening to radio. I'm easily able to break 1000 points but some of those African languages (Dinka) are really hard! I'm so thankful for this site. It's really really cool!
- VLM 13y ago"listening to radio." For me specifically, shortwave radio. I still have a R-75 hooked up although I don't often use it anymore. I used to have a R-390 and its "mobile" cousin the R-392. I've found the audio quality has little or nothing to do with the appeal of listening to foreign lands, so listening over the internet has had little if any change in that hobby vs using a radio. Although I do get most of my non-tech news from the BBC now, so I do appreciate the podcast feeds, something you could never do with radio. I think most HN readers would appreciate BBC Radio 4's "In our time" program. Not every episode, especially not the more science/tech oriented, but most episodes are entertaining / mind expanding. I get it as a podcast via a RSS feed. I would think all the startup opportunities relating to podcasting are long since used up? There seems to be a way to monetize anything people spend time/money/effort on, and at least some people do that with podcasts, so logically there must be a way to make money off them...
- albeec13 13y agoI was up to 500 before missing two in a row, but then I encountered a bug where the audio track seemed to not download properly, so hitting play caused the progress bar to jump straight to the end without playing anything. Pretty cool idea overall though.
- ghayes 13y agoI got 550 on my first try. It's kind of fun, kind of impossible. Serbian versus Croatian versus Slavic is just a shot in the dark.
- adamnemecek 13y agoDo you mean Slovenian?
- hepek 13y agoWell, distinguishing standard Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian is impossible even for native speakers, as it is in fact one language. The division being merely a political one. One can only distinguish accent subtletlies in certain words. It would improve fairness of the game and avoid a lot of confusion not to allow these languages appear in the answers together.
- babuskov 13y agoYou should either throw Bosnian out or not offer it together with Serbian. It's a dialect of Serbian really and many people in south Serbia speak the that dialect (see for example Sanjak region: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjak_of_Novi_Pazar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjak_of_Novi_Pazar). Bosnian language is just a political decision, because it's a sovereign country now and needed to have it's own language as Serbia was an aggressor in the last war, so having the official language named Serbian would offend both Bosniaks and Croats living in the country. Also, Croatian and Serbian can only be distinguished by words. You can't recognize the intonation because it's the same. If you don't know words specific to these languages, you won't be able to tell the difference. It would be best to have a filter that prevents them being in the same question.
- patmcguire 13y agoI got a 650. Surprising how easy it was to pick out what was Indo-European or Semitic, everything else was hard. Only got Indonesian because of The Act of Killing.
- emhs 13y ago700. Missed Tagalog, Slovenian, and Amharic. Also, dude, you could do with another Lao clip, or a better clip-selection algo, 'cause I heard the Lao clip twice. Would've been good if it had been a different clip, but giving me the same clip is just a gimme. Great game, though.
- jay_m 13y agoI had the same thing happen with Hebrew, 3 free wins with the same clip.
- hayksaakian 13y agoThis is really fun, except now that i'm getting server errors (probably due to HN traffic) I can't play...
- nowarninglabel 13y agoIt's amazing how distinguishable accents are. I wonder how much voice recognition software keys off of accent? I've a few South/Eastern Asia friends that never do well with spoken GPS recognition, but if it could know their native tongue was Gujarati or Thai then I imagine it could do a much better job of analyzing their English. I was pleasantly surprised to make it to 800.
- jsmeaton 13y agoI work in the call centre space which deals with voice recognition IVRS. If there is no voice pack available for your specific country, a number of 'utterances' are collected to train the recogniser. So, yes, accents are used in the voice recognition software that I'm familiar with.
- Pitarou 13y ago800? Wow. I speak French and Japanese, and I've spent a lot of time with Poles, but I still only got 500.
- acanzy1818 13y ago<iframe src="//www.facebook.com/plugins/follow?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhakan.aktan.792&layout=standard&show_faces=true&colorscheme=light&width=450&height=80" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
- staunch 13y agoI think it'd be more fun (and less difficult) to guess the accents of people speaking English.
- tlb 13y agoGreat. I'd also like a tutorial, which plays two languages with superficial similarities and points out the differences.
- chrismorgan 13y agoI found it rather fun pressing the "next" button and then switching away from it and just listening and forming an opinion thus before looking at the options. Region of language was often pretty accurate thus if I wasn't able to guess the precise language.
- dbz 13y agoI'd love to see some stats on how others have done. Also, it would be nice if you didn't have to press back fifty times (or long click select) to go back to the last site you were on.
- chrismorgan 13y agoOne of the languages is labelled "Bangla", the transliterated form of the native spelling বাংলা. Given that you've used the English names of most languages there (I can't speak for all of them), I'd prefer the consistency of "Bengali" there.
- lars512 13y agoThanks for the feedback. Many of the languages have multiple aliases, I can't say I've made a principled choice in every case. But, updating to "Bengali" is in the todo list.
- moron4hire 13y agoI built a similar thing, with a physical representation, covering US accents: http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/60153233552/a-thing-i-built-a-while-ago-you-can-see-it-in http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/60153233552/a-thing-i-buil... for this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov it ended up in this place: http://www2.fi.edu/ http://www2.fi.edu/
- malkia 13y agoI was up to 800 points, and I got server error... (edit). Retried again, and since that was my last life, I've got it wrong. I was lucky though, as I got two times Bulgarian, and I'm from Bulgaria :) Played second time, 650, and third time 950. I've got lucky again, since Dutch was twice in a row, and few other languages. It's cool, reminds a bit of Google's find this place on earth, by "driving" around until you see a sign, or some very known place.
- azernik 13y agoJust got a 502 error, but really like the custom 502 page.
- jpatokal 13y ago850. It would be a bit nicer if the randomly selected other language choices came from different language families: one of the three I got wrong was Bosnian vs Croatian, even though the difference is arguably a political construct (just don't say that to a Bosnian or Croat...). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian,_Croatian_and_Serbian#Morphology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian... The difference between Punjabi and Hindi is also pretty subtle. Mistaking Thai for Vietnamese, though, was inexcusable. =(
- jpatokal 13y ago2nd attempt 1050. Had precisely the same sound sample twice in a row though? Also, this serves as a pretty handy hint that when you're completely stumped by something you've never, ever heard before, the answer is probably "Dinka": http://greatlanguagegame.com/stats/ http://greatlanguagegame.com/stats/
- joeyo 13y agoIndeed. The Dinka sample is recorded off the radio or phone and is very difficult to hear as well (It's not like I really know what Dinka sounds like, but if it were easier to hear I could at least do a better job of eliminating the other options).
- jessaustin 13y agoBosnian was certainly the tricky one for me: is it really the same clip every time? The first time I missed it, I thought I heard "bagus" so I guessed Malay. The second time I missed it I guess I really have no excuse! Still I got 600, and I don't feel bad for not being able to distinguish Gujarati from Punjabi from Urdu. It's been some time since I heard any of those languages spoken.
- pdknsk 13y agoIn the sound clip for Ukraine, the person actually says Ukraine (or very similar) a few times. Also, the snippets should be normalised. Some are very quiet.
- lars512 13y agoVolume's been normalised using mp3gain. I manually screen all the snippets for English, music or other noise, and obvious giveaways. Looks like a Ukraine case slipped through -- it's in my todo list to remove. Thanks!
- ziedaniel1 13y agoThe Portuguese one also had a word sounding like "portuguese" in it that made it trivial for me.
- jacalata 13y agoThe Kurdish one says Turkey which helped me guess, not sure if that is being too picky though :)
- gjm11 13y agoAnd there's a Hungarian one in which I'm pretty sure I heard "Magyar" (though I could be wrong -- I don't know any Hungarian).
- lars512 13y agoThis is against my annotation guidelines, so it's a sneaky case that slipped through. I'll make a note to review the Portuguese samples -- thanks!
- FreeFull 13y agoThe Slovak sample is very obvious, since it says Slovak at one point.
- lars512 13y ago
- blahedo 13y agoGot to 500 and had to guess (definitely Slavic, but had a choice between Czech, Slovak, Macedonian... yikes!)... and got a 522 Timed Out error. Thhbbbbt.
- lars512 13y agoAwww, that sucks. I hope you refreshed and reposted your guess.
- bluesmoon 13y agosame here. 522 error. reposting has no effect. still 522s or Method Not Allowed errors.
- lars512 13y agoThanks guys, apparently my server is overloaded: https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/23670002-Error-522 https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/23670002-Error-522 I'll see what I can do about it.
- MasterScrat 13y agoIs loading an intermediate page to tell if the answer is correct really worth it? I would do that client-side, save the loading time and bandwidth...
- jameswyse 13y agoNice, though I gotta admit I was disappointed it wasn't programming languages!
- rdtsc 13y agoHa! I expected computer languages. I might have a problem... But that would be a cool game too for programmers. Here is a snippet of code, what language it is in?
- Dewie 13y agoGot through 8 questions and then 522 Connection Timed Out...
- ipogios 13y agoHa! I too assumed this was on programming languages :) By the way, I will bet some of those people talking about founders with thick accents are not doing too well on this one.
- bilalq 13y agoHey, this is really cool. Awesome work! One tricky thing I noticed was that there was one audio clip that was in Urdu, but it was discussing something written in Arabic. Indeed, the clip had more Arabic than Urdu. Fortunately, Arabic wasn't an option, so I got it right. That's the kind of edge case that might appear in other clips as well, and might be something to watch out for.
- edu 13y agoto slow to be fun :(
- neil_s 13y agoBiggest bug for me is that if you click on one of the two languages, it still waits till the entire clip finishes playing before progressing to tell me 'right' or 'wrong'. UPDATE: never mind, its not when the audio finishes playing, its just slow to load.
- andrelaszlo 13y agoThe Slovakian clip actually has the word "slovak" in it... I think :)
- doktrin 13y agoAs does the Ukrainian voice sample.
- yread 13y agoThe Bulgarian one has something with Portugal :)
- malkia 13y agoI'm Bulgarian, and was wondering how others perceive our language. But I can always understand when someone speaks portuguese, although I know very little of it (I've worked with couple of cool people from Brazil).
- NKCSS 13y agoCool, but the site is very slow.
- beyondcompute 13y agoI thought it would be about programming languages :) But it's awesome nevertheless!
- pascalo 13y agoGreat game. Had 900 pts and then got cloud flare errors :(. Only thing you need to work on is to exclude repetition of clips when the game progresses.
- artgon 13y ago800! w00t
- gpvos 13y agoThere were several times when a fragment of which I had already guessed the language correctly came up again two or three rounds later, which made it a lot easier. I think it would be better to keep track of that, and have more fragments per language, and round-robin between those. Maybe I just got lucky, but I think 1200 for the first play is a good score. :)
- jvanstry 13y ago404
- jvanstry 13y agoWell I got a 404 Error.... but it was fun until then!
- tuzemec 13y ago950 and I went twice against my initial hunch and lost :-)
- riffraff 13y agofirst: this is fun! second: maybe you can use rel=prefetch to speed up loading?
- etfb 13y agoIt's interesting how quickly that went from "duh, dead easy" to "no frakking idea". I don't even now what Amharic is, let alone how it sounds...
- pawelwentpawel 13y agoI really like it. It would be cool if the score would be based on how quickly you answer too. Also, I would be very interesting to find correlation between how many/what languages user speak as native/learned to how many languages they can recognize. For example, it's funny how knowing just one Slavic language helps you not only to recognize any other ones (or in some easier cases understand a lot) but also spot the small differences in accents or vocabulary.
- tehwalrus 13y agoEDIT: first, great game. I'll be coming back to see if I can improve my score! :) Meh, only scored 350, although in my defense I am quite deaf at the moment (temporarily). I was also lucky as I got Mandarin twice (which I've studied) and German once (same.) Two of my three errors were picking the wrong one of the two plausibles once the number to choose was 3 or 4. With higher quality audio (and functioning ears) I think I could have got higher (so I could hear more of the sounds being used.)
- mahrz 13y agoGot to 1200, but am still surprised how easily Portoguese can be mistaken for a slavonic language. And the Bosnian/Croatian samples are really not that easy to distinguish. It would really be cool if the scores somehow reflected this, maybe depending on your native language... not sure what a good scoring system would be here.
- jadyoyster 13y ago1150 on my second try (thanks ridiculously multicultural upbringing), great game! I got a few immediate repeats of the same language; maybe preventing those would be a good idea?
- lars512 13y agoThat's a solid effort! Pruning immediate repeats is in the todo list, thanks for the recommendation.
- thinkersilver 13y agoI don't if this was the lag because the system was underload but I had to wait for the recording to finish before I could go to the next question. Would you be able to make it go to the next question once I have answered instead of having to listen to the entire clip.
- professorwimpy 13y agoThat was a treat! Thanks for making it! :)
- icecreampain 13y ago1400 but that's only because I'm interested in languages. I speak English, Swedish, German, Romanian, can read the other roman languages ( French/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish) can read and write Farsi. I have no problem differentiating between Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. The quiz is most difficult when presenting me with choices between slavic combinations (Ukranian/Polish/Russian) and far east weirdness: Tamil / Burmese / Malay.
- netvarun 13y agoCould you elaborate a bit on the part where you mentioned "far east weirdness: Tamil / Burmese / Malay". What's so weird about those languages? All three languages you mentioned are linguistically very different and have long histories (particularly Tamil). I wouldn't call them far east either. These languages are predominantly spoken in South and South-east Asia. (I am from Singapore where Tamil and Malay are official languages)
- icecreampain 13y agoThey're "weird" because I have little experience with them, having barely ever heard malay until this quiz. I correctly guessed it because I heard the word "muslim" or "islam" in the clip. And they ARE far east, if you're European. :)
- koliber 13y agoI think that Czech and Slovak languages are incredibly similar to each other. often times, when reading the instructions on some product in both languages, they differ by one word here and there. I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other. A cool variant on this game could be "guess where this English accent is from."
- unhammer 13y agoIf anyone wants to do it with Norwegian dialects, there's an awesome set of audio samples of the same text here: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/nos/nos_kart.html http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/nos/nos_kart.html ("I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other" – I highly doubt that. Dialects/languages differ more and more the closer they are to your own; I can tell if someone grew up a 15 minute drive away from me, but if the choice is between a place that is e.g. >3 hrs north vs >4hrs north I have a really hard time placing them.)
- oblio 13y agoCan you provide more stats? I'm curious for the full list of language stats - which ones are easy to guess, which ones are hard to guess.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoCan someone verify the Turkish sample (http://media.greatlanguagegame.com/samples/752c4c30d475748a342c68ebfba24d1e.mp3 http://media.greatlanguagegame.com/samples/752c4c30d475748a3...)? I've only been there on holidays but it doesn't sound right to me, perhaps it's just the low quality of the sample but the phonemes seem far more 'Eastern' to me.
- skion 13y agoIt'd be great if the multiple choices appeared a few seconds late, giving some time to let your senses guide you.
- ksrm 13y agoExtremely slow unfortunately.
- tluyben2 13y agoHad everything correct until a guru meditation popped up. I think most Dutch people should score very high on this.
- ianferrel 13y agoI got the same sound clip twice in 3 rounds. It was much easier the second time :)
- hrasyid 13y agoIs it really slow or only because trafic from HN?
- vivin 13y agoVery nice. I got 500! I second-guessed on all my wrong answers.
- untitledwiz 13y agoOne of the Norwegian samples is an interview about Varg Vikernes (aka Burzum)!
- clueless123 13y agoGreat game Big lag! I hope this is because lots of people are playing :)
- lars512 13y agoThere's some DevOps and some marketing lessons in here for me. But, long story short, the server's back up and running smoothly today. If it felt sluggish for you yesterday, please try the game again and enjoy it as it's meant to be played!