
A game to learn a new language - velcro
http://babadum.com/
======
xiaoma
I spent years as a foreign language teacher, curriculum designer and
eventually language school owner. That experience has largely made me numb to
these sorts of products and claims.

Learning words isn't the same thing as learning a language. Spaced repetition
is exciting to people when they first learn about it, and it's great for
memorizing certain types of discrete information (e.g. the capital cities of
each country, the periodic table of elements, etc...) Memorizing a dictionary
doesn't lead to language skill, though. At best it's a useful stockpile that
will speed up your later learning efforts, but at the cost of thousands of
wasted hours.

If you're determined to learn a foreign language from a heavily memorization
based method, at least use an audio-lingual system that will give you decent
pronunciation! The Pimsleur Approach will do that. It will beat not only
words, but pronunciation and grammar into your head. It's mind-numbingly
boring especially after the first one or two languages, but less so than a
vocabulary memorization app.

~~~
jeza
Pimsleur isn't the most efficient way to learn a language. I find Assimil to
be a much more interesting method. The audio component is required purely in
the target language with no instructional content and very little repetition.
So it is up to the end user to decide how much or little repetition they need.
This ultimately means that the recordings contain far more vocabulary and
phrases than what you'd get in the same time as Pimsleur. Though it certainly
doesn't feel like your hand is being held as with Pimsleur.

The audio is used alongside a printed book that has one side of the page in
your target language and the other in your native language for a direct
comparison.

You still learn good pronunciation, grammar, words and phrases, but in a far
less boring way than Pimsleur. Also there's the added benefit that you get
some language immersion since the audio is purely in your target language.

Even still I would say that Assimil isn't enough on its own. To make the
process of learning a language interesting you need to utilise a variety of
tools and methods.

~~~
maaku
Assimil is also really good if you add the sentences/phrases of the dialogs
and exercises to an Anki deck as you go along (flipping the card direction
when you reach the "active phase"). The review gives you really high retention
(and you can kill cards or the entire deck once you finish and get them to
maturity).

If you want to use Assimil for a European language however, try to find the
older "without toil" courses - they are _so_ much better.

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lelf
… to learn a bunch of words you mean?

For playful language learning there is
[https://www.duolingo.com](https://www.duolingo.com). It's waaaay ahead.

( _Edit_ : up to ~A2 level by only messing about with the app ahead)

~~~
Void_
Yes we didn't hear about Duolingo yet, here on Hacker News.

Kudos for all the work that went into drawing those words. Great job.

This is obviously not a tool to learn a new language, but it's a lot of fun,
and you can learn some new words. (But it could use some algorithm for
repeating words.)

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nezza-_-
I have a problem with all the apps/sites that promise you that you can learn a
new language: They are mostly vocabulary trainers, not language trainers.

Simply learning some vocabularies doesn't cut it, a language consists of much
more. For example in duolingo: While I learned some vocabularies, I have no
idea how to create a sentence or if there are rules for the accents in spanish
etc.

~~~
jeorgun
I wonder if there's any particularly good way to gamify learning grammar,
though— you can't really quantify it in the same way as you can vocabulary.

My favorite suggestion for online language learning, whose source I've long
since forgotten, is to have a story / article / other piece of writing that
gradually transitions from English grammar to language-being-learned's
grammar, then performs a similar transition over vocabulary (like
[http://dotsies.org/stories/the-
lamplighter.html](http://dotsies.org/stories/the-lamplighter.html) , but with
an alternate language instead of alphabet).

I haven't seen any implementations of this, and it'd probably be practically
impossible to automate, but feel like it has some potential.

~~~
maaku
Yes, the method is simple: massive exposure to input (see the Assimil "without
toil" series for a good example). Using spaced repetition and NLP you could
introduce gradated input customized to the user to provide ever increasing
vocabulary and grammar points. This is a practical version of what your
dotsies example would look like, individually adapted to users.

I've actually thought long and hard about how one would construct such a site
and what the algorithms would look like to provide effective language
learning. It's just one more thing I don't have the time to actually do,
however, as much as I would love to actually use the site...

EDIT: If someone actually wants to do this, email me.

~~~
cgag
Where might I find your email? I've thought a good bit about this too, I
actually bought extensivereader.com a few years ago as a placeholder when I
was experimenting with building something, and have recently been considering
attacking it again.

edit: I'll assume you're maaku on github.

~~~
maaku
Huh, for some reason I thought HN had a way of emailing users. I added my
email to my about field in my profile.

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candeira
Looks like a good vocabulary trainer for pre-literate students! I plan to use
it with my 4 year old daughter (I'm a native Spanish speaker but my wife is
Australian and we live in Australia, so her English is way ahead of her
Spanish).

One piece of advice. For gendered languages like Spanish (I'm native) and
German (which is the one I tried, as it's the one I'm trying to improve), you
need to learn the gender of nouns, so you should ad the article before each
noun ("die Sonne, der Mond"). Otherwise you get vices from the beginning.

Ah, and also for the pre-literate to literate transition, you could maybe add
a pronounciation-to-written-words game.

Great illustrations and interface, well done!

~~~
candeira
After trying it with my daughter:

\- Some words are way too difficult for several reasons, from knowledge of the
world (what's a typewriter?) to word length (in the "pictures to written
words" game, "debajo de" was difficult to read, "mil" wasn't).. It would be
cool if, when you add a difficulty grading, you have a separate path for
children.

\- In the "written and spoken word to four pictures" game, we clicked on the
word expecting to hear it repeated, but the interface assumed it was a click
in one of the four quadrants (so we randomly lost about 75% of the times we
clicked). The expectation was there after playing with the "spoken word to
pictures" game, where the center icon is a "play" icon that repeats the word.

\- For children starting to read, and possibly for people whose native
language doesn't use the target language's writing system, it would be cool if
the interface repeated out loud the reading of the word in some of the games.
Again, as an example, the "written and spoken word to four pictures" game
where, currently, the word is read only once at the beginning.

Again, good job. My daughter told me she was tired of playing and went away,
only to come back 15 minutes later asking for more.

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octatone2
Missing gender articles for nouns in gendered languages makes this pretty
useless for learning words.

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ilSignorCarlo
The illustrations are just lovely and really helpful to learn words. I was
using this method to study german vocabulary with Anki and very often it's
difficult to find a suitable image for every word. Since I tried this app for
german as well, I'd say it's bad that the words aren't shown with their
article or, at least, the gender. So it should appear "das Auto" instead of
just "Auto".

Then, the register form has a confusing UI. After I compiled it to create a
new account I clicked on the first button available which actually was "I
already have an account".

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pcurve
Despite the OP's title, the web site make it pretty clear that it's a word
game site.

I'm amaze at how much work went into this. The interface interaction is very
enjoyable, and makes you want to keep going.

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matthewmacleod
I'll not comment as to the vocabulary/language thing, but the interface and UX
of this is really, really excellent. It feels fun to use and has a strong and
pleasant visual identity. Great work.

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codygman
I need to get out more, I thought this meant programming language... lol.

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desireco42
I don't see reason for negative comments, this is excellent, I love it. And is
great way to immerse into several foreign languages.

I was thinking a lot about this recently, and no I can't make it myself, but
it would be good to have a way to expose yourself to multitute of foreign
languages. Like 7-9 of them. I think I could learn languages that way, or
words. As for grammar, once I have some foundation, I can learn it. I very
much like their approach.

I just saw that they have mixer mode where they show you words from any
language, perfect !

~~~
araso35
Hey desireco42, you might want to take a look at this website
([http://www.oplang.org](http://www.oplang.org)). It's called the Open
Languages Project. You'll like that it gives you the 7-9 languages exposure
you're looking for. I've been using it to learn Korean and it's been pretty
effective (I can read now but a way to go before I understand what I read)
Their method reminds me of the Michel Thomas method where there is no need for
notes or memorization. One word is introduced in each lesson and thought in a
logical structure.

~~~
desireco42
Thank you for the link, I will check it out.

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nosa_manuel
After playing the game for a while I think it is remarkable in its depth and
specificity of vocabulary. I've learned through error that you can really harm
fluency by including any trace of L1 in your vocabulary practice, and this
product seems to solve that problem.

As other comments have pointed out, there's a lot more to learning languages
than vocabulary, but this looks like a really good implementation of an
important piece of the process.

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drivers99
Kind of funny that most of the Japanese words (I didn't look at that many
though) were katakana (the writing system for loan words, usually English), so
it was basically figuring out that "pu-ru / プール" was pool, "sofa / ソファ" was
the chair (is an overstuffed chair considered a sofa there?). etc.

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funktor
This is a lot of fun! People may say that learning a few vocab words isn't
learning a language, but it certainly helps. You really have to add on a way
to repeat what was said though. Also I found some of the pictures needing a
bit of explaining. Great work though.

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borplk
Interesting. Is this yours OP? In that case I may be interested in
contributing words for other languages.

Idea: allow people to add and fix the language database (imagine how many
words and how many different languages will add up)

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platinumdragon
I don't get it. What's with the clouds always obscuring all or part of the
pictures we're supposed to identify?

~~~
randartie
Sounds like a bug, that did not happen to me. (On chrome latest)

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thekaleb
For anybody that is interested, these are the languages the website has:

\- GB: British English

\- ES: Spanish

\- DE: German

\- FR: French

\- US: US English

\- JP: Japan

\- IT: Italian

\- RU: Russian

\- PL: Polish

It also seems to have a bonus polyglot "language".

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cupcake-unicorn
What technologies (apis/libraries/etc.) are you using here?

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saurabh_math
Really nice...this requires lot of work..keep it up.

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crncosta
This is awesome! Kudos for the team/devel.

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merrua
I like memrise and anki myself.

