Regarding our language tools

Sun Feb 9 19:29:00 UTC 2014

Greetings Inge :)

Excellent observations. When I started on parley, these were the exact
things that seemed to be lacking even though it still seemed pretty cool. A
lot of these points are similar to my experiences too, as a French beginner
(started on DuoLingo, an app and a website).
My experience on DuoLingo: The first thing I liked was that each lesson was
way way shorter, approx 5 words. That really helped in my attention span
and helped me focus. Also with every short lesson, I got a sense of
achievement (also affected by their UI, trophies etc.) As an adult these
things really helped me, and these would really help someone younger which
could potentially become a large userbase for Parley. We'd just have to
keep the technical side of the things in the back, and keep everything
simple and to the point. I showed it to a middle school language teacher
for some feedback, and she recommended making it easier and less
intimidating for the first time user, 'cause it really turns off some,
especially those not necessarily developers themselves.

She also suggested having an option of being able to print the flashcards
so that they can be kept in pockets too and revised in a train or somewhere
else. That would be nice too, 'cause that technique of revision of tough
words really helped me in my competitive exams last year. Also being able
to print the whole word list might be useful to stick it on a wall or
something.

And learning pronunciation would be an excellent idea. I know we have
Artikulate for that, but can't it be incorporated into Parley too. Maybe
even enforcing the add sound option, and using it even as a lesson/question
itself like you suggested.

And one of the concerns I've had while using Parley is standardization of
data. There is no standard rule of how data for different collections is
set. Some languages have proper differentiation of words among nouns,
adjectives, etc. But some of them don't even translate properly (eg "the
lamp"'s translation doesnt include "the" in the translation and adding the
translation of "the" in the answer makes it wrong). Most of the ones I have
come across don't use all the features parley provides (eg sound, imiages,
etc).

-Amarvir

On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 9:22 PM, Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se> wrote:

>  I am happy to see the increased activity around our language tools,
> mainly Parley and Arikulate and I thought I'd give some input to the future
> of them. I apologize in advance because it's quite long.
>
>
>
> What I will do is to describe my experiences with some online tools, what
> I learned from them and discuss how we could apply that to our own
> applications.
>
>
>
> As some people know I have been studying the thai language for about 5
> months now. I estimate that in this time I have managed to "learn" around
> 700 words. I say "learned" instead of learned because I don't think I have
> mastered them for real yet, i.e. put them into my long term memory. I have
> also studied some grammar but I will only touch vocabulary training here.
>
>
>
> I started to use Parley for my vocabulary training but had to give up
> that, mainly due to lack of data. There are simply too few data files for a
> serious student. Instead I turned to various web based tools. For my
> vocabulary studies I used the following two sites:
>
>
>
> * languagecourse.net
>
>
>
> They have a very nice free vocabulary trainer for a number of languages.
> You can select your native language and the language you want to study and
> then you can select any one of a number of wordlists to practice. There is
> one called "top 500 most common words" that I managed to finish.
>
>
>
> Unfortunately the wordlists seem to be auto generated from newspapers so I
> learned words like "project" and "industry" while still not seeing "chair",
> "plate" and other every day words. :)
>
>
>
> This flashcard implementation uses the same basic principle as Parley i.e.
> leitner boxes, but have a slightly nicer interface for collections than
> Parley. Your learning is split up into sessions where each session is split
> up into a "study" phase and a "test" phase. The study phase gives you 4
> sets of 7 words (28 in total) which is followed by the test phase where you
> get 28 words to answer correctly. Each word shows the word to translate
> plus 4 choices. If you get it wrong, the same word will appear again before
> the test phase is over. So if you have many new words, you may end up with
> a pretty long test phase.
>
>
>
> This site is totally free. Their business model is to book language
> courses and they only use the vocabulary trainer to get some free
> attention. And that seems to work because I got a very good impression from
> them.
>
>
>
> * thaipod101.com
>
>
>
> This site is one in a whole bunch of websites called <language>pod101.com.
> So I guess what I'm saying now is applicable also to the other sites.
>
>
>
> This site has a number of tools to help you study the language in question
> but I mostly used the flash card vocabulary trainer. This one is simply
> genious! I managed to learn almost 300 words in 5 days, after which it was
> interrupted because this tool is normally only available for paying
> customers. But when you sign up for your free account you get access to the
> paid tools for 7 days. And I am seriously considering paying them because I
> never saw a more efficient learning tool in my life!
>
>
>
> You start with a very nice dashboard where your selected word lists are
> nicely displayed. For each list you can see how many cards are due right
> now or during today. The cards are shown according to the leitner principle
> like in all the other applicationss, including Parley, but with a number of
> twists.
>
>
>
> Learning is split up into sessions. A session consists of 5 to 20 words.
> There are never more than 5 new words in a session but if you have worked
> with a word list before, you get a number of old words coming back to you.
> Inside the session they are shown until you get them right. If you answered
> wrong the interval until it is shown next time is reduced to a minimum and
> then increased when you get them right the first time. So far it's just
> like all the others, but here are the twists:
>
>
>
> - They recognize that translating from your native language to the new one
> (written), from the new one to your native one (written) and recognizing
> just a spoken words (sound only) are 3 different skils that need to be
> trained each one. They mix all the 3 modes into the session and keep track
> of the progress of each mode independently. This means that for one set of
> words you get them back in 3 different ways intermixed with each other. And
> even when you are looking at them in text only mode, you always have access
> to the spoken version by clicking on a button.
>
>
>
> - For each card and each mode, they keep track of a time interval when the
> word is "due" next time. This time starts at a few minutes (seems to be ~3
> to begin with and ends at several months. But the difference to other
> systems that I tried is that when you are learning a new word, it helps you
> a lot with the shorter intervals. So from 3 minutes, you get an interval of
> 7 minutes if you recall them correctly, then 20 minutes and so on. I
> haven't been able to determine the exact method of prolonging the interval
> but that should be relatively simple to find out.
>
>
>
> - They don't have 2 buttons ("knew the word" and "didn't know the word")
> but 3: "didn't know", "knew somewhat" and "knew well". This helps a lot
> when I have a wordlist where I already know some of the words from other
> studies. If you click the "knew well" button, the intervals increase twice
> as fast, which means that I can concentrate on the words that I didn't know
> much easier.
>
>
>
> - They have a very nice graphic layout with a dark background and white
> and clear letters, with some nice animations of the card turning that is
> pleasant to look at. I don't know how important this is for learning, but
> at least it made me not turned off.
>
>
>
> All in all, this things made the tool very very efficient. It was very
> easy to do "just one more session" since they are pretty fast to go
> through. And you always have the "x cards due now" in the dashboard to give
> you some incentive.
>
>
>
> * learn-thai-podcast.com
>
>
>
> I also used the Learn Thai Podcast and paying for a lifetime subscription,
> not because of their vocabulary training (because it sucks :) ) but for
> their very extensive set of lessons about grammar and every day spoken thai.
>
>
>
> -----------------
>
>
>
> Parley
>
>
>
> So, how does all of this compare with the KDE tools? I haven't been able
> to build Artikulate yet because I have a too old KDE system, but I have
> been using Parley a bit and I'm sorry to say that it's lacking.
>
>
>
> The flash cards have too small text and the buttons are also too small.
> When I'm learning, I want to concentrate on the contents, not hitting a
> button or squinting to read the text. I want the words to jump on me, not
> hide in a corner. All of this is configurable and I at length managed to
> get a nice looking layout but I don't want to have to find settings when I
> begin to study.
>
>
>
> But my main problem with Parley now that I look back at it with my
> experience from the other tools is the focus. The focus of Parly is data,
> not learning. It starts with a list of files and 3 buttons: Create, Open or
> Download collections. I also have a list of filenames of collections that I
> have accessed recently.
>
>
>
> But there is no dashboard of my learning, no showing what the word lists
> *are*, only their (rather technical) names and no clue on where I should go
> next.
>
>
>
> When I open a collection I get a tree view of the sublessons with
> percentage figures and if the collection contains more than 2 languages, a
> rather longish list of translation alternatives to the left. Not really the
> overview I want to have when doing my studies.
>
>
>
> I can list a number of detailed issues that I have but in general I don't
> feel like I am in a learning tool. Rather a collection manager.
>
>
>
> But all of this can be fixed. Parley has a great infrastructure so the UI
> should be pretty easy to fix. I wonder if any language teachers are on this
> list and can comment on my findings
>
>
>
> Regarding Artikulate, as I said I haven't been able to build it yet. I am
> curious how that tool is organized and I'd love to see if we can take any
> ideas from it into Parley. After all, learning to pronounce a word is very
> close to learning to recognize it.
>
>
>
> ----------------
>
>
>
> Data, data, data
>
>
>
> Seriously, we need much more data. We can probably create word lists
> automatically, but we have no tools(?) to do that right now.
>
>
>
> But a bigger problem is multimedia.The site languagecourse.net has a
> picture with every word in their collections and all the sites have a short
> soundclip with a native speaker saying each word. I understand that the
> Artikulate team is doing something similar but I don't know how that is
> going. But this is something that we need to do more of if we ever want to
> have our tools to be used.
>
>
>
> Also, I think we need to extend our data format. At least we need to give
> indications of the word class of each word. I remember being asked to
> translate "clean" into thai, but there was no indication of whether this
> was the verb "to clean" or the adjective. Perhaps also a way to give a
> little explanation of some words in the kvtml file.
>
>
>
> And we need a way to embed images and sound into the collections. It's not
> feasible to have one file for a list of 100 words and then an additional
> 100 files for the images and 100 for the sound clips. The open document
> format (ODF) has a nice way of storing a number of files: xml, images, etc,
> into a zip storage. We could use the same, and there is nice libraries in
> the kde code base to handle that.
>
>
>
> -------------
>
>
>
> Conclusion
>
>
>
> I will end here, and I probably need to apologize again for my rambling.
> But I think these tools are imporant and it's a pity that the relatively
> minor technical glitches make our programs so much less enjoyable.
>
>
>
> Let's start a discussion on taking them to the next level and see what we
> can do to use our experiences from other tools and actually running them to
> make them better.
>
>
>
> -Inge
>
>
>
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