The click and drag UX is cool. BUT, it’s super annoying that it reorganizes every time you drag one off. So the next one you may have been looking to drag has now moved (or it means you accidentally grab the incorrect one). Can they stay in their positions? (Eg, replace in place with a greyed out version of the removed word)
Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
151–160 of 189 posts
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#152Great idea! How did you decide on the pricing? I launched a Japanese Kanji Learning App (KanjiMaster.ai) last month, and I chose a subscription instead of a one-time payment.
Thanks! I decided on it because I think people are fed up with subscription systems and it was easy to implement. However, I made two sales (yay! first time ever) but I paid $20 today to DeepL. I might change it in the future.
I just purchased 6 months of Pro access. Good luck with this project! It has good potential.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#153The few UX things can make for a really frustrating experience. You don’t want to push away your users in their first testing.
1. Change the word “gaps” to “blanks” for English audiences. It fits the common phrase “fill in the blanks” better. And maybe call it that too.
2. Don’t make the blocks move around for the drag and drop. It makes for a frustratingly slow process to find where the word you were about to grab moved to.
3. Don’t just correct a wrong answer, show what the user chose. I had too many moments where I was convinced the answer was what I had selected. Even using the red/green doesn’t quite make sense if you’ve replaced an incorrect answer with a now correct answer.
3. Consider doing the check after all words have been dropped in so they can read the sentence as a whole. And thus give them the chance to change their word choice.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aaa, you saved me, thought it's broken, but you have to drag this thing! ps. video shouldn't loop as default, it's annoying.
You didn’t even read the most basic settings that clearly say “click and drag interface” or something similar. But I still agree, tapping/clicking should work in sequential order eventually (it’s not as easy to implement). Re, looping; there are controls to turn it off. You aren’t paying attention one bit. If you’re going to say things, at least be diligent in the things you are going to address.
It’s not clear that those controls are for the video on first glance. I thought they referred to the exercise itself (eg, restart exercise).
I think you’re not thinking like a new user.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#155This is an amazing concept.
It would be nice to limit the YouTube content a bit like not just news, but an option for news in slow French, or something else. At least for me news in slow French is way easier to understand than news in French at 0.5x in you tube.
Maybe it's just my phone, but the dragging and dropping wasn't hit or miss it was mostly broken. On an English speaking video (my native language) filling in three gaps took me like five video repetitions to get the words in place. It made me feel a lot better about my Spanish speaking performance. Just clicking the words like someone else suggested would solve the problem completely for me, but it might be like a "hit box" problem on the words.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#156One minor but very nice aspect of the UX is that I was able to click the link and immediately try it out. I wasn't even planning to really use it but ended up completing a round. My only complaint is that the drag and drop is kind of annoying as the default selection process, clicking would feel more natural.
For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#157Don't autoplay in a loop it's very annoying. With that gone, it will be fun.
Remove drag and drop.
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
Is it? At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling. A good way to think about it is look at some organiza…
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#159Nice work. A similar concept with songs, I guess it was called lyricstraining.com earlier:
Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
Is it? At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling. A good way to think about it is look at some organiza…
there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.