51–60 of 125 posts
Put the learning stuff at the forefront, and the gamification stuff can be on the side for people who find that fun. The difference is something like mathacademy is trying to actually teach you math, duolingo is trying to hook you to look at ads.
Do you want to live off selling the app? Might be hard, not impossible.
Are you building it for fun or to help people? Excellent idea. Sign me up.
Not doing subscriptions for an app that has ongoing server costs is going to bite you, you may want to reconsider that. Your biggest issue is going to be that language learning for adults is largely an unsolved problem. I know people with 1000+ day streaks on Duolingo who are nonetheless not fluent, and from everything I’ve read, it seems clear that spaced-repetition techniques are not sufficient (and possibly not ne…
It's solved, look up comprehensible input: https://www.dreaming.com/blog-posts/what-is-comprehensible-i... The problem is duolingo is particularly horrible and is intended to get people addicted, not educate.
Theoretical educational frameworks don't replace the day-to-day struggle of trying to get shit done. (Doing this is, of course, extremely uncomfortable, and people will avoid it at all costs.)
Yes, according to Duolingo's (obviously biased) CEO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6uE-dlunY Found this episode fairly interesting (without being particularly interested or personally invested in the space)
This is interesting and a nice conversation, thank you. He talks about how they wanted to let people know that they would stop sending them notifications after five days of inactivity, but that the "passive-aggressive" nature of that notification actually got people to come back. To me it illustrates that it's such a fine line to walk if you want to respect the user but also maybe push through their own lack of motiv…
The funny passive-aggressive communication style is something I personally consider Duolingo's thing. I kinda like it that they have a persona and stick with it in all of their communication.
If it was cold and to the point "you have missed today's lesson", I wouldn't come back.
Could we say that Anki is a non-gamified app for learning?
Anki is complicated to the point of being intimidating. Even just the card/note split is quite confusing—I built another app to drill me on decks backwards and forwards because I found this so confusing.
It ended up being easier to Vibe code a bespoke one that took the input in a format that was easier to provide.
Not doing subscriptions for an app that has ongoing server costs is going to bite you, you may want to reconsider that. Your biggest issue is going to be that language learning for adults is largely an unsolved problem. I know people with 1000+ day streaks on Duolingo who are nonetheless not fluent, and from everything I’ve read, it seems clear that spaced-repetition techniques are not sufficient (and possibly not ne…
It went from 200 words of long term retention to 3000 words.
Spaced repetition is the most inefficient efficient way to learn the vocabulary. I never have the "see once, learn forever" effect with any kind of deck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creator of calmcode here, AskMeAnything[tm].
Do you accept contributions?
- Proper reviews actually feel like they would take me as much time as doing it myself.
- One benefit of doing it all myself is that all the content has a familiar style.
- The downside of contributions is that a lot of the stuff that I see on YT just simply doesn't fit the style that I intend to have on calmcode. So before accepting contributions it also feels like I would have to vet the person who makes the contrib.
A lot of the aforementioned is more complex now as well due to the fact that folks can pay for the platform. It was a 100% free platform before, and right now it's a 99% free platform and some people pay a stipend to keep the site running. If contributions come in, I would also need to figure out a way to keep the incentives aligned, which also complicates things.
I've had a collaborator in the past and a bunch of things worked out there. But he's gone off to do other things, all of which is fair enough.
* The market for actually useful, non-gamified learning apps is smaller than, say, Duolingo.
* Yet the market for bullshit apps is too saturated. There are maybe 50 such apps for each major language already in the App Stores.
* As a customer I'd be happy to pay for serious, boring learning apps, and I believe such serious customers exist. (but in much smaller numbers)
* Market for serious, boring language learning apps is underserved. (for German there are apps like Readle, Vocabeo, Vocabuo (yes, lol naming), DerDieDas that cover specific niches, and (afaik) only DW has a quite comprehensive actual learning program)
I believe potential customers like me exist, but our numbers are much less than "learn Spanish in 5 minute games" crowd and our expectations are higher too. Up to you to decide if this is a valuable niche to serve.
Language learning apps are the ultimate sand-pit for solo developers thinking they can offer some random unique feature that Duolingo (or "Anki but better") doesn't offer. Without realizing, they don't do it for a reason. Language learning has extremely low activation and retention. And it's super easy to find one or two early adopters that like your app for some reason to keep going.
And solo developers that get into language learning often are only strong in software development and lack in UX, design, product, or marketing.
You may start with a calm, "not Duolingo gamification" style app, but every language learning app starts with pure intentions until you're many months or years in, your numbers are low, you need to make money, and you need to move the needle.
My two cents, you don't have to heed it obviously.
Having an app oriented toward being used by anyone has the advantage that you can slap an ad up anywhere, and you'll reach a potential customer.