
Show HN: Language Learning with Music and Lyrics - ro-_-b
http://www.linguician.com
======
arafalov
Kind of annoying that there is nothing to try before signing up. Not even a
single song in any of the languages. Or any real screenshots.

On the other hand you can get quite far without an account on
[https://lyricstraining.com/](https://lyricstraining.com/)

~~~
ro-_-b
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.

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theprop
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.

~~~
ro-_-b
thanks for the comment. Yes, we will offer a trial without sign up for at
least one song.

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peterburkimsher
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.

~~~
ro-_-b
Thank you for your suggestions. We will implement a new screen with all lyrics
translated.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Here's an example of the lyrics I'm studying from:

[https://pingtype.github.io/KHOP/index.html](https://pingtype.github.io/KHOP/index.html)

[https://pingtype.github.io/index.html?chineseFile=KHOP/Might...](https://pingtype.github.io/index.html?chineseFile=KHOP/Mighty%20To%20Save%20-%20大能拯救.txt)

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ansek
To the author: have you ever learned a language?

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?"

~~~
wodenokoto
The best workout is the one you do. For a lot of people, language learning
have some tedious rote memorization elements.

And not everybody have access to an "enthusiastic teacher"

These two things combined leaves plenty of room for "methods, apps and tricks"

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Kinnard
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/](http://zemirotdatabase.org/)

------
notheguyouthink
Interesting! I'd try it if:

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

~~~
ro-_-b
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".

------
adrianh
Please list the available languages on the homepage or About page. I didn't
want to sign up without knowing whether you covered my target language.

~~~
wodenokoto
They are listed on the sign up/try now page

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SnacksOnAPlane
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.

------
balnaphone
I love the concept!

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 useful to
get the flavor of a song's overall meaning.

15- Not sure what the black music note in the red circle at the top right of
each video is supposed to do.

16- There are multiple errors in the English translations, e.g. "they live"
for "their lives" I believe, but it's very difficult to enumerate them without
the ability to select text to copy and paste.

 _In summary: This is really a great platform, I look forward to seeing where
this goes!_

~~~
ro-_-b
Hi, Thank you so much for your feed back.

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!!

~~~
balnaphone
Regarding #1:

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.

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trevyn
Cool idea, but I was annoyed by the signup, and it doesn't seem to work for me
-- the video plays, but it just shows "Loading Lyric..."

~~~
trevyn
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.

~~~
ro-_-b
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.

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xrd
Great idea. I signed up and chose Portuguese. Spanish was shown to me and
can't change that for some reason.

~~~
ro-_-b
You should be able to add an additional course. - so you have two courses
enrolled.

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chfs
Thanks for sharing! Are you using this method yourself? If yes, how often,
what are your impressions and results?

~~~
ro-_-b
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!

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godmodus
Would be nice if trying it did't require a sign up.

~~~
ro-_-b
good suggestion - we will implement that

