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SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

soyoulearn.com

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Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#91

Post by zpr »

salimmadjd wrote: post #33
AndreRauh wrote: post #6

Founder here. Note: This is spaced repetition. I bootstrapped this over the past 1 1/2 years. A few key differences: - A central DB (it has over 1.8M flash cards) which anybody can edit. Card owner can accept/reject the change request. - Courses are just references to flash cards, nothing else. - You decide what you want to learn "Display me field X,Y,Z and prompt me to enter field 'A'. You can choose any field/audio…

Hopefully my use case is useful to you. I'm a heavy user of Duolingo. Been trying to teach myself Russian for the past 2-3 years. Almost use it on daily bases (I have missed a few days here and there by accident or when I had no connection). Usually my repeat usage is anywhere from 20 days to now 143 consecutive days. My biggest frustration with Duolingo (Russian language) is that none of the grammar rules are explai…

FYI, if you are interested in the gramatical explanation of a level, you could log into the web version of Duolingo (your same account will work) and they are all there for many languages, as well as several other features (depending on the language) such as a full dictionary of words you've studied, and each has its own "health bar". There are also flash cards although now Duolingo has a separate app for that called TinyCards.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way but with the number of people I've convinced to use it, I should be getting commission.

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#92

Post by zpr »

mikekchar wrote: post #87
salimmadjd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully my use case is useful to you. I'm a heavy user of Duolingo. Been trying to teach myself Russian for the past 2-3 years. Almost use it on daily bases (I have missed a few days here and there by accident or when I had no connection). Usually my repeat usage is anywhere from 20 days to now 143 consecutive days. My biggest frustration with Duolingo (Russian language) is that none of the grammar rules are explai…

The following advice is based on the assumption that you want to eventually acquire both adult level fluency and adult level proficiency in your second language. If you do not, then it's a whole other conversation. Having learned Japanese late in life, and also taught English as a second language professionally for 5 years, my advice is -- don't bother with grammar explanations. Instead of using Duolingo, read books.…

This is great advice. Thanks for the anecdotes.

I'm a native English/Russian speaker who took a few Spanish courses in high school and college, and recently decided it would be a waste if I didn't finally learn to speak it fluently, at least like a child. In some sense, I suppose I already do. I can read many things and spoken slowly enough can understand partially -- but there is some mental block, mostly in the smaller, connecting words and other "minor" details that are actually major and completely central to the language. So I drill duolingo from time to time but it seems like mostly a waste of time since I know a majority of the words, and the ones I don't know such as "curtain" aren't critical for me. I always had the idea to visit Spain for several months to force myself to adapt to the language but that's been impractical thus far. I knew reading would be good too and your story of learning Japanese is inspiring, so I think I will find some children's books or Mexican menus. Thank you

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#94

Post by AndreRauh »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #93

Does it have an API? I would like to build an app around the flashcards database (a completely free one, giving full and very visible credits to SoYouLearn of course). Can I?

It does not currently and it's not a priority for me right now. Can you contact me by email? I'm curious about your app, maybe we can work something out.

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#96

Post by AndreRauh »

hmd_imputer wrote: post #95

I just signed up and I am a little freaked out. How did you know what my Native language is and what other languages I speak? The only info I provided was my email.

It just uses javascript navigator.languages object by default. :)

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#97

Post by AndreRauh »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #82

Another feature I miss is a button to discard a card. E.g. when I study country flags and see a flag I remember perfectly and have always knew - I want to click once and never see it again in the repeat series. Also, it would be nice if I could choose the correct answer (e.g. a county name for a flag) by clicking it among a set of options instead of typing it in manually all the time.

You can discard a card during initial learning and also during review. This will however remove it so it won't ever come around for review. Not sure if that's what you want? I don't currently support "claim known" during learning, though implementing it would probably be pretty easy.

I don't currently have an option for multiple choice learning. That's something I might do in the far future.

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#98

Post by laurent123456 »

SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #65

With a product like Anki out there I see no reason for this to exist. Does this product have any advantage over Anki that I'm missing? The only one I can see is a central database, something which Memrise has and which is quite mature on that platform. A central database is also a disadvantage as far as I'm concerned as it means that copyrighted material is made significantly harder to study. When you add to these th…

I use Anki every day but I've always found its interface unintuitive, more often than not I have no idea what the various configuration options mean so I just tweak them randomly until it kind of work like I want. Certain things I've never managed to do (for example how to increase the reply time to over 60 seconds in the Android app).

So although I like Anki overall I would welcome an alternative to it.

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#99

Post by barry-cotter »

zpr wrote: post #92
mikekchar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The following advice is based on the assumption that you want to eventually acquire both adult level fluency and adult level proficiency in your second language. If you do not, then it's a whole other conversation. Having learned Japanese late in life, and also taught English as a second language professionally for 5 years, my advice is -- don't bother with grammar explanations. Instead of using Duolingo, read books.…

This is great advice. Thanks for the anecdotes. I'm a native English/Russian speaker who took a few Spanish courses in high school and college, and recently decided it would be a waste if I didn't finally learn to speak it fluently, at least like a child. In some sense, I suppose I already do. I can read many things and spoken slowly enough can understand partially -- but there is some mental block, mostly in the sma…

I highly recommend LibriVox audiobooks for listening comprehension. My German had deteriorated greatly from when I was living in Germany and I decided I wanted it back so I listened to Anna Karenina in English and German, chapter by chapter. Wonderful book, beautifully read in English and in German. LibriVox has Don Quijote in English and Spanish though I can’t speak to the quality of the reading.

And LibriVox is free.

Re: SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform

#100

Post by barry-cotter »

bahman2000 wrote: post #77
AndreRauh wrote: post #6

Founder here. Note: This is spaced repetition. I bootstrapped this over the past 1 1/2 years. A few key differences: - A central DB (it has over 1.8M flash cards) which anybody can edit. Card owner can accept/reject the change request. - Courses are just references to flash cards, nothing else. - You decide what you want to learn "Display me field X,Y,Z and prompt me to enter field 'A'. You can choose any field/audio…

My use case is I want my child to grow their native vocabulary, eg. when they read books with new words that they don't know. I couldn't seem to be able to pair the languages that way. Is this supported?

I strongly suggest using Anki. It’s free unless you want to use the iPhone app and cloze cards are exactly what you want if the goal is to be able to use new vocabulary correctly. You can even add dictionary definitions in the Extra field.

All that said the best way to increase native vocabulary is to read more.

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