
Show HN: How we built a TTS-powered tool for learning spelling/foreign languages - philfreo
http://quizlet.com/blog/the-making-of-speller/
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philfreo
@asuth and I built "Speller" -- would love to hear any feedback on it. You can
try it out here:

<http://quizlet.com/2139265/speller/>

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asuth
More examples:

Swedish numbers: <http://quizlet.com/3614707/speller/>

German clothing: <http://quizlet.com/1692182/speller/>

French animals: <http://quizlet.com/1060977/speller/>

Japanese adjectives (good luck!): <http://quizlet.com/343188/speller/>

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wccrawford
Tried the Japanese one... Can I suggest you stick to the hiragana and katakana
syllabaries? You've thrown a couple kanji in there and it's confusing for some
of them because you want the kanji form, but others you want straight
hiragana... With no rhyme or reason for it.

I also just tried a French one (not the one you linked) and the hints to the
side were less than helpful. I guess that's to be expected from a user-
generated list. I think I'm also not used to listening to French, and that
didn't help... Couldn't really hear what was being said. Again, that could
just be my ears, though.

All-in-all, I think it'll be great learning tool... But I thought I'd bring
the above to your attention.

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nicpottier
Very cool, I did something similar when trying to learn Kinyarwanda. (only
works on Chrome, click on the lessons to deactivate them)
<http://kinya.nyaruka.com>

Surprisingly similar in a lot of ways, though obviously you guys took it a lot
farther. (mine was a few hours thrown in after work to help me study)

The TTS is amazingly good. One suggestion would be to easily allow the
repetition of a word. At least in Kinyarwanda the pronunciation is so critical
that being able to easily repeat the word really helped. Perhaps the TTS isn't
quite good enough for that though.

But really nice, great work.

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cosgroveb
Just wanted to say that my girlfriend is a third grade teacher and she loves
quizlet...

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fuzzythinker
I don't think I've ever seen so much links to useful tools on a blog post
before. Thanks!

Edit: The <http://css-tricks.com/7323-box-sizing/> seems like it will come in
handy.

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loevborg
A comment about "speller". All in all, I like it, especially the clean optics
along with nice animations.

1\. Looking at the site from Germany, I automatically get German translations.
In German, the tool "speller" is called "Buchstabierer". That seems like an
overly literal translation. Not that I can come up with a better word, but it
strikes me as an unprofessional-sounding choice.

As an aside, this seems to me to be a rather common problem. Many web sites (I
imagine) hand a word list to a translator, who then produces the best
translations he can find. But if he isn't involved in developing the software,
he can't suggest changes to the software that might be necessary to adapt it
to another language. I guess my point is that proper internationalization
involves more than just a quick translation of a few words. Often I would
prefer to be presented with the English version by default, with the choice of
opting for my native language.

2\. The animation that suggests a different spelling is nice. If I enter
"comminciare" when asked for the Italian verb for "to begin", it strikes out
the second "m", which makes sense. But not so much if a smaller part of the
word was correct. Even if only one or two letters were right -- perhaps I
enter "andare" instead of "camminare" -- it ought to strike through the whole
thing, instead of falsely suggesting to me that I almost had the right answer.

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philfreo
Most websites (including Quizlet) don't change what language they show based
on your country, but rather based on what your browser settings are - so if
you really prefer English usually, you can change that. (We also have a footer
dropdown to change the language).

Let me know if you think of a better word for "Speller" in German.

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chromedude
Very cool to see what happened behind the scenes and what went into all the
iterations!

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rryan
Interesting writeup. The lessons learned section could apply to any startup.

