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Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar. A few questions: Do y

by laurieg 11y ago

Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar. A few questions: Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners? On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?

steveridout 11y ago
Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words). Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section. I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site. Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.

by laurieg 11y ago

steveridout 11y ago

Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words). Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section. I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site. Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.