Live data from Hacker News

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

greatlanguagegame.com

81–90 of 173 posts

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

#82

It's amazing how distinguishable accents are. I wonder how much voice recognition software keys off of accent? I've a few South/Eastern Asia friends that never do well with spoken GPS recognition, but if it could know their native tongue was Gujarati or Thai then I imagine it could do a much better job of analyzing their English. I was pleasantly surprised to make it to 800.

800? Wow.

I speak French and Japanese, and I've spent a lot of time with Poles, but I still only got 500.

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

#84
post #80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If people want to cheat that badly, let 'em.

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

#85
post #80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that a problem? I presume you're not offering prizes.

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

#86
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! 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.

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

#87
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…

Definitely a very cool concept, but the code could be improved a bit. I'd ideally like to see something like this primarily to be run via Javascript. Then once you guess it'd just download a new audio clip + the correct answer... way less lag.

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

#88
I really like it. It would be cool if the score would be based on how quickly you answer too. Also, I would be very interesting to find correlation between how many/what languages user speak as native/learned to how many languages they can recognize. For example, it's funny how knowing just one Slavic language helps you not only to recognize any other ones (or in some easier cases understand a lot) but also spot the small differences in accents or vocabulary.

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

#89
EDIT: first, great game. I'll be coming back to see if I can improve my score! :)

Meh, only scored 350, although in my defense I am quite deaf at the moment (temporarily).

I was also lucky as I got Mandarin twice (which I've studied) and German once (same.)

Two of my three errors were picking the wrong one of the two plausibles once the number to choose was 3 or 4.

With higher quality audio (and functioning ears) I think I could have got higher (so I could hear more of the sounds being used.)

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

#90
Got to 1200, but am still surprised how easily Portoguese can be mistaken for a slavonic language. And the Bosnian/Croatian samples are really not that easy to distinguish. It would really be cool if the scores somehow reflected this, maybe depending on your native language... not sure what a good scoring system would be here.
Post reply on HN