Posted by ph4evers 3 days ago
Every video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough for these short exercises.
Would love your thoughts!
My advice would be to have languages default to an "alpha" state, and only progress them to "beta" and "1.0" state when they reach certain milestones, as defined by community feedback.
Most of the videos also contain subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the exercises (you can disable the video manually though). Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally (e.g. [み][ません]), so it's unclear how you're expected to fill them in.
In the end if what you really want is "real-world content", then you just need to go out there and find them yourselves - they're everywhere.
I immediately noticed that too. Are the "gaps" generated by an LLM? I think the model might not understand Japanese very well.
But of course there are other ways, so a "fill in the blank" question with two gaps right next to each other is generally a bad idea.
It's like cutting gaps out of English sentence like this: I'm [go][ing] to beat the shit out of that guy. Sure we know the logical way to break down 'going' is 'go' and '-ing', but it should be one single gap anyway.
Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.
ps. video shouldn't loop as default, it's annoying.
Re, looping; there are controls to turn it off. You aren’t paying attention one bit. If you’re going to say things, at least be diligent in the things you are going to address.
I think you’re not thinking like a new user.
Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.
But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.
You can do it!
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
20 hours a week of intensive instruction.
Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks
This is what it actually takes.
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.
I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares
I disagree that it's an illusion. People are learning a new language when using Duolingo, but 5-10 minutes/day means it will take a long time before they are proficient. Someone else linked to the state department website showing 550-690 hours of learning required on the English adjacent languages.
Requests:
- Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America
- Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)
- Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)
> Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America Will do!
> Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)
I'm working on splitting it up in easy/normal videos. That should be do-able to assess.
> Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)
I'm thinking about creating a browser plugin where you can tick a box to automatically import it into Fluentsubs. Or create an exercise from an existing video. It will take minutes before it is fully transcribed but it can be a nice way to prep your own content without people blaming me that I serve biased content.
I'm not sure though if people are willing to install browser plugins. I'm always a bit weiry with plugins that are invasive on websites like YouTube.
For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.
Edit: also tried in French, and it shows some words in red (I guess that means "invalid" -- please don’t convey information with color only) although they are correct: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1o6d5002s8v1p2h0m2f...
I'm working on improving the feedback. It is a bit confusing since some words are very similar so you have no idea what went wrong.
I checked the Italian video. But I don't fully understand: https://imgur.com/a/YcF3dnb . It doesn't pick qualcuno as a filler word. Is it still broken?
Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.
Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.
Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.