Extremely slow unfortunately.
The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
121–130 of 173 posts
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#122Can someone verify the Turkish sample ( 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.
Definitively Turkish. And pretty standard dialect.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#123Hi 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-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 em…
Great! 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.
Actually, 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.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#124Hi 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-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 em…
That 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.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#125Had everything correct until a guru meditation popped up. I think most Dutch people should score very high on this.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#126Nice! 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.
I'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!
"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...
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might 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).
Yeah, 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.
I 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.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#128In 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.
Volume'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!
The Slovak sample is very obvious, since it says Slovak at one point.
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#129The Slovakian clip actually has the word "slovak" in it... I think :)
The Bulgarian one has something with Portugal :)
I'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).
Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
#130Hi 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-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 em…
Thank 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.