Hi, thanks for your answer. Yes, of course I use it my self for learning languages. Its good to get you used to the pronunciation of a foreign language. Some vocabularies will really stick with you when they are part of the song, then it is really difficult to forget. What I like most is that it is a fun and entertaining time - not like Duolingo, which is a great product, but feels boring after two minutes. - of course Linguician needs improvement - and I hope we can deliever on this in the next months!
Yes, but we took more Duolingo as our referenced than the other platform you mentioned since we have translated language learning lessons. We will offer one song to try before sign up - but we will need to collect the user data at some point since we want to offer personalized language lessons in the next months.
Some constructive feedback, running chromium on linux:
1- The lyrics can't be selected with my mouse, making it difficult for me to use other translation tools to get a sense of what the lyrics mean.
2- Below the lyrics section, there is what looks like a blue progress bar moving from "full" on the right, then moving to "empty" on the left. I have no idea what progress this is tracking. It seems to bounce back to full after going to empty, and since each cycle appears vaguely related to the progress of the text, I assume there is some connection. However, it isn't clear.
3- There are four blue boxes below the reverse progress bar, which are mostly empty but occasionally have words in them. And if I click in the area, they adopt colors, one green and if wrong, the others red. However, it seems like the translation of the lyric that is in red matches the translation in green, and the other words in the remaining 3 boxes are red. Wouldn't it make more sense to make the lyric highlighted in green, so you can visually see that it matches the word in green? The fact that the selection is wrong can be indicated by setting the background of the answer area red, rather than making the red appear in the lyric itself.
4- The instructions only appeared on the third video I watched, the first two I either didn't see the one line instruction or it didn't appear. Probably the former, so it might make sense for the instruction line to appear for a longer period of time.
5- The text boxes move around, it would be much easier and effective for me if I could press 1 2 3 or 4 to select the appropriate box. The mistakes I've made so far are mostly getting the pointer in the correct position, rather than not knowing which is the correct translation.
6- With understanding that "everyone is a critic": I found the music selection annoying, at least in the English->French series.
7- With understanding that "I have no idea of your intended profit model": it seems very challenging to get breadth and depth in terms of the number of languages, dialects, and songs out there. One possibility that other language-learning tools have used is crowd-sourcing the data, i.e. enabling users of the site to input videos, lyrics, timings, difficulty levels, perhaps even offer ratings and corrections.
8- While linguician makes a nice adjunct to primary language learning, and I can see the charms of sharing culture along with language, and having video that may provide more cues to meaning, it seems that there is some ideal threshold in terms of comprehensibility for language learning. For example, I've heard that an ideal scenario is one at which the language learner is always in a state of roughly 90% comprehensible speech, but in linguician it doesn't seem scalable in terms of comprehensibility. Contrast this to, for example, Earworms MBT, which for a new language learner is totally comprehensible and slowly builds up.
9- Having gone through the painful adult language learning process multiple times, I feel that adding relative scores adds some way for users to feel where they are at.
10- The lyrics on the first three videos I selected took approximately 20 seconds to load, which seems a bit excessive given that 20 seconds of HD video have been downloaded by that point.
11- The progress bar, which I believe is a timeout counter for selecting the appropriate response, begins its countdown significantly before the target phrase is shown on the screen.
12- Now it appears the videos have a dual selection, "I want to know this" versus "I already know this", which probably has to do with the path taken to get to the video. This seems like somewhat of a waste of time -- either teach or test, or explain what the point is.
13- The videos say "press play on the video to start", but the videos begin playing automatically anyway.
14- Having a way to see or hide a full translation of a song may be us...
2.) This should be the time that is moving - as it continues you are losing the time and you should act quickly in order not to lose the opportunity to answer correctly and to get the coins
3.) thank you for your suggestions. we will think about this
4.) noted
5.) it is because the length of text strings in the boxes differ - but I agree with you that fixed boxes could improve UX
6.) once there is a demand for one language combination we aim to drastically increase the available music
7.) good point - we are working on this - since the complexity of our product is considerably higher than that of other platforms in this niche it is not that trivial. we would need a full infrastructure compared to Duolingo to monitor and steer the user generated input
8.) we are working hard to adjust Linguician to the level of the user - also with Machine Learning - the refore we need some user data first - I am sorry for this
9.) noted
10.) competely agree - we are working hard to fix that one
11.) noted
12.) the idea here is to collect user data and at one point be able to deliver content that is more targeted to the level of the user
13.) on the phone this is not yet the case
14.) completely agree - we have these views on our server - they are not yet released on the platform
15.) this is our coin symbol - we thought it is clear but apparently it is not - thank you for the hint
16.) yes, this process does not work so smoothly as once imagined - we are working hard to improve the quality
Thank you very much for you feedback - it is super relevant and we will study it in detail!!
On a regular webpage one is able to select any text on the page by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer over the text, then pressing Ctrl-C or right-click and select "Copy" from the context menu.
On your site, when the lyrics appear, I am unable to select the text using the mouse (unless I run some javascript to undo overrides on mouse behavior or select the text from the page source).
This makes it inconvenient to see alternate translations or to post corrections to the text.
I'm using the method of listening to music to study Chinese.
It's helpful to let me follow what's going on in church. And I'm much more likely to remember the vocabulary. I don't just want to see words for a second though - it's helpful if I can read all the lyrics on the screen at the same time.
Ok, works now. I very much want easy/fast access to translation for all of the lyrics, not just select words. Hovering over a lyric to provide the translation would be awesome. This plus a large Spanish-to-English playlist would have me throwing money at you right now.
Great - thank you for the comment. We will implement the hover you suggested soon and we will work hard the next weeks to increase the number of songs available in the playlist.
There will always be people who like to learn languages by using some new methods and individuals who create them.
Since my native language is not English and not even in the same language category, I could say that you don't need all those "methods", apps and tricks.
Language learning is all about having the right mindset.
All you need is 3 things:
1) A good input for listening and reading and a good output in form of writing and speaking. Just find an enthusiastic teacher.
2) Alleviation of psychological blocks and obstacle like "I'm not good at this" or "I don't have a gene" or "I'll never speak like natives".
3) Knowing the big "why" as in "Why do you want to learn that specific language?"
Linguician is not meant to be the exclusive resource one may use for language learning. We don't brand or market it as a trick. It is meant as a playful and entertaining alternative you have on top of your own methods that you have for language learning.
Nice idea! Definitely add a list of languages on the home page. Also try to remove the sign up. I'm actually pretty intrigued obviously by the service, but not sufficiently to sign up (hence I haven't signed up!). I'd add a sign up later in the process i.e. after someone listens to a few songs then ask for a sign up to save progress and you'll probably get the user then.
Hebrew is a great fit for this method, there are centuries of music, the entire language and culture is based off of the Torah which in fact is a song:
http://zemirotdatabase.org/
I know some Japanese, including the phrase "give me my money back", because I would constantly play the Japanese version of Ben Folds Five's "Song For the Dumped". So there's some anecdotal proof that this works.
A. I knew there was an Android app or not (i didn't clearly see what OSs were available)
B. It had Japanese. I know it's difficult of a language, but the only one i'm interested in atm.
As an aside, i'm curious at how well this works for people like me. Eg, i have a very difficult time understanding artists who speak my native language (english). I often confuse words, etc. So doing so in another language, oof. Appears difficult. I'd be willing to try though
Hi, thank you a lot for your feedback. There is an Android web based app out there - a native app will take time but is on our to do list.
Regarding the songs, yes, there are some that are difficult to understand but others that are very easy to follow up - just think of for example "Rather Be" by "Clean Bandit".
30 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadOn the other hand you can get quite far without an account on https://lyricstraining.com/
Some constructive feedback, running chromium on linux:
1- The lyrics can't be selected with my mouse, making it difficult for me to use other translation tools to get a sense of what the lyrics mean.
2- Below the lyrics section, there is what looks like a blue progress bar moving from "full" on the right, then moving to "empty" on the left. I have no idea what progress this is tracking. It seems to bounce back to full after going to empty, and since each cycle appears vaguely related to the progress of the text, I assume there is some connection. However, it isn't clear.
3- There are four blue boxes below the reverse progress bar, which are mostly empty but occasionally have words in them. And if I click in the area, they adopt colors, one green and if wrong, the others red. However, it seems like the translation of the lyric that is in red matches the translation in green, and the other words in the remaining 3 boxes are red. Wouldn't it make more sense to make the lyric highlighted in green, so you can visually see that it matches the word in green? The fact that the selection is wrong can be indicated by setting the background of the answer area red, rather than making the red appear in the lyric itself.
4- The instructions only appeared on the third video I watched, the first two I either didn't see the one line instruction or it didn't appear. Probably the former, so it might make sense for the instruction line to appear for a longer period of time.
5- The text boxes move around, it would be much easier and effective for me if I could press 1 2 3 or 4 to select the appropriate box. The mistakes I've made so far are mostly getting the pointer in the correct position, rather than not knowing which is the correct translation.
6- With understanding that "everyone is a critic": I found the music selection annoying, at least in the English->French series.
7- With understanding that "I have no idea of your intended profit model": it seems very challenging to get breadth and depth in terms of the number of languages, dialects, and songs out there. One possibility that other language-learning tools have used is crowd-sourcing the data, i.e. enabling users of the site to input videos, lyrics, timings, difficulty levels, perhaps even offer ratings and corrections.
8- While linguician makes a nice adjunct to primary language learning, and I can see the charms of sharing culture along with language, and having video that may provide more cues to meaning, it seems that there is some ideal threshold in terms of comprehensibility for language learning. For example, I've heard that an ideal scenario is one at which the language learner is always in a state of roughly 90% comprehensible speech, but in linguician it doesn't seem scalable in terms of comprehensibility. Contrast this to, for example, Earworms MBT, which for a new language learner is totally comprehensible and slowly builds up.
9- Having gone through the painful adult language learning process multiple times, I feel that adding relative scores adds some way for users to feel where they are at.
10- The lyrics on the first three videos I selected took approximately 20 seconds to load, which seems a bit excessive given that 20 seconds of HD video have been downloaded by that point.
11- The progress bar, which I believe is a timeout counter for selecting the appropriate response, begins its countdown significantly before the target phrase is shown on the screen.
12- Now it appears the videos have a dual selection, "I want to know this" versus "I already know this", which probably has to do with the path taken to get to the video. This seems like somewhat of a waste of time -- either teach or test, or explain what the point is.
13- The videos say "press play on the video to start", but the videos begin playing automatically anyway.
14- Having a way to see or hide a full translation of a song may be us...
1.) hmm.. I did not understand this point
2.) This should be the time that is moving - as it continues you are losing the time and you should act quickly in order not to lose the opportunity to answer correctly and to get the coins
3.) thank you for your suggestions. we will think about this
4.) noted
5.) it is because the length of text strings in the boxes differ - but I agree with you that fixed boxes could improve UX
6.) once there is a demand for one language combination we aim to drastically increase the available music
7.) good point - we are working on this - since the complexity of our product is considerably higher than that of other platforms in this niche it is not that trivial. we would need a full infrastructure compared to Duolingo to monitor and steer the user generated input
8.) we are working hard to adjust Linguician to the level of the user - also with Machine Learning - the refore we need some user data first - I am sorry for this
9.) noted
10.) competely agree - we are working hard to fix that one
11.) noted
12.) the idea here is to collect user data and at one point be able to deliver content that is more targeted to the level of the user
13.) on the phone this is not yet the case
14.) completely agree - we have these views on our server - they are not yet released on the platform
15.) this is our coin symbol - we thought it is clear but apparently it is not - thank you for the hint
16.) yes, this process does not work so smoothly as once imagined - we are working hard to improve the quality
Thank you very much for you feedback - it is super relevant and we will study it in detail!!
On a regular webpage one is able to select any text on the page by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer over the text, then pressing Ctrl-C or right-click and select "Copy" from the context menu.
On your site, when the lyrics appear, I am unable to select the text using the mouse (unless I run some javascript to undo overrides on mouse behavior or select the text from the page source).
This makes it inconvenient to see alternate translations or to post corrections to the text.
It's helpful to let me follow what's going on in church. And I'm much more likely to remember the vocabulary. I don't just want to see words for a second though - it's helpful if I can read all the lyrics on the screen at the same time.
https://pingtype.github.io/KHOP/index.html
https://pingtype.github.io/index.html?chineseFile=KHOP/Might...
There will always be people who like to learn languages by using some new methods and individuals who create them.
Since my native language is not English and not even in the same language category, I could say that you don't need all those "methods", apps and tricks.
Language learning is all about having the right mindset.
All you need is 3 things:
1) A good input for listening and reading and a good output in form of writing and speaking. Just find an enthusiastic teacher.
2) Alleviation of psychological blocks and obstacle like "I'm not good at this" or "I don't have a gene" or "I'll never speak like natives".
3) Knowing the big "why" as in "Why do you want to learn that specific language?"
And not everybody have access to an "enthusiastic teacher"
These two things combined leaves plenty of room for "methods, apps and tricks"
A. I knew there was an Android app or not (i didn't clearly see what OSs were available) B. It had Japanese. I know it's difficult of a language, but the only one i'm interested in atm.
As an aside, i'm curious at how well this works for people like me. Eg, i have a very difficult time understanding artists who speak my native language (english). I often confuse words, etc. So doing so in another language, oof. Appears difficult. I'd be willing to try though
Regarding the songs, yes, there are some that are difficult to understand but others that are very easy to follow up - just think of for example "Rather Be" by "Clean Bandit".