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The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

greatlanguagegame.com

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Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#71

Post by troels »

prawn wrote: post #26
lars512 wrote: post #3

Hi 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…

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.

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#72

Post by gpvos »

There were several times when a fragment of which I had already guessed the language correctly came up again two or three rounds later, which made it a lot easier. I think it would be better to keep track of that, and have more fragments per language, and round-robin between those. Maybe I just got lucky, but I think 1200 for the first play is a good score. :)

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#75

Post by akamaka »

lars512 wrote: post #3

Hi 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 idea, and very fun!

I'd love to see a couple of adjustments:

First, the scores right now aren't very meaningful. The chance of winning each round is highly dependent on being lucky with the multiple choices (e.g. I'll always be able to guess Spanish vs. anything else, but my if options are two African languages, it's a coin toss). I think the distribution of scores over several games will end up being similar to playing a series of random coin tosses. My own scores varied greatly.

Second, it would be great to have more clips of each language, without having the same person speaking twice. The educational element of the game gets lost when you start overtraining on the same clip.

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#76

Post by stewbrew »

lars512 wrote: post #3

Hi 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 idea. It would be nice to see a chart with the distribution of scores though or at least the quartiles next to the high score.

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#77

Post by jacalata »

ziedaniel1 wrote: post #43
lars512 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Portuguese one also had a word sounding like "portuguese" in it that made it trivial for me.

The Kurdish one says Turkey which helped me guess, not sure if that is being too picky though :)

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#78

Post by beambot »

lars512 wrote: post #10
kbaker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool game, and nicely presented! I got a 250, then 400. It might be good to ask the user where they are from (non-intrusively of course, maybe a simple country selector or IP lookup) to get another dimension on the statistics. Or what languages they already know as well might be interesting when looking at the results.

I'm recording GeoIP country and the Accept-Languages header from their request. Hopefully this generates some interesting data to pore over later. Monthly data snapshots might be useful for researchers.

Showing a distribution of scores would be cool too. EDIT: D'oh. Just saw the "stats" link. Would still be nice to see a distribution of scores.

Re: The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?

#80

Post by benaiah »

nkoren wrote: post #62
lars512 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry about that. I'd planned a little more infrastructure work before submitting it to HN. Wish me luck :)

Infrastructure is good, but some of the lag could be fixed with code. For example: the page should already know whether a given answer is correct, and give a response without needing to hit the server at all. This would give you instantaneous feedback, which the user can digest while the next audio file is cached. As it is, having to wait 5-10 seconds for my button-presses to register is really killing the enjoyabili…

You don't want the correct answer on the client before the answer is submitted - it would be trivial to cheat by extracting the answer with a little bit of reverse engineering.
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