A game to learn a new language

http://babadum.com/

by velcro • 12 years ago

75 45 12 years ago

babadum.com

platinumdragon• 12 years ago

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

randartie• 12 years ago

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

nezza-_-2• 12 years ago

Can't confirm here on latest chrome.

nezza-_-2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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 , 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.

Void_2• 12 years ago

In schools they use tests to quantify knowledge of grammar. Forget about grades, collect eggs, wooden sticks or whatever, and there you have your gamification.

anateus• 12 years ago

The approach of the Michel Thomas Method is the closest thing I've seen to teaching grammar in a way that directly exercises our grammar-learning ability. In their audio, there is a teacher and two students. The phrases and words you are taught are not anchored in practical usage the way Pimsleur does, but are more random. However, the exercise portions require you to construct completely novel arrangements.

That is, let's say they taught you how to say "I want a cookie" and "She hates cats" you would be asked to say "She hates cookies".

baby2• 12 years ago

The first thing I wanted to do when I finished reading the dotsies story, was implementing that for chinese.

NoahTheDuke• 12 years ago

Wow, dotsies is awesome.

maaku3• 12 years ago

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.

baby2• 12 years ago

I found a really good one last year : yabla.com

I paid for a couple of months for the chinese version, it's really well made but the content is not exciting enough. Can't speak for other languages but I really think this is the best way to learn (this and podcasts).

lelf• 12 years ago

… to learn a bunch of words you mean?

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

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

Void_2• 12 years ago

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.)

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Agreed. After trying Rosetta Stone, then LiveMocha (basically a web clone of Rosetta Stone, in terms of course style), I think that style is one of the least effective and most boring/fast to lose interest of all such learning tools. And this new tool seems to largely imitate Rosetta Stone.

I found Duolingo has a much more efficient way of teaching you the new language (words get stuck a lot faster in your mind).

geoka9• 12 years ago

Thank you for the duolingo link! I found my ultimate procrastination tool :)

octatone2• 12 years ago

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

codygman• 12 years ago

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

xiaoma• 12 years ago

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.

entendre• 12 years ago

If you're determined to learn a foreign language its because you have social pressure to do so.

Or because you can envision a career path that will allow you to use it.

Or because you're a pedantic prick/prickess.

But mostly because its a college requirement.

b6• 12 years ago

I'm determined to learn Mandarin. So far, I've spent two years in China learning it. It's not because of any social pressure, or because it helps me in my "career", or because I'm pedantic, and I graduated college years ago. Just one data point.

ghayes• 12 years ago

While I agree you are likely correct, I would add that this can be used to augment your language learning. If you take learning a language as a holistic experience, then there is definitely a place for memorization of vocabulary.

Anecdotally, I'm working on Spanish right now as my girlfriend speaks native Spanish. The immersion that gives me is great, but I also just need to memorize the words for "wallet" and "scissors".

jeza• 12 years ago

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.

maaku3• 12 years ago

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.

forkrulassail2• 12 years ago

I fully agree with you, but Anki (with pronunciation) got me 12k German words in 12 months with 40 minutes daily where Goethe couldn't give me a functional understanding of German whilst travelling. Grammar and the functional language comes ter with constant translation or immersion with sites and experiences like the excellent DuoLingo.

forkrulassail2• 12 years ago

A specific problem I have with this very fun (I must say) site is that gender isn't shown with nouns.

lucian1900• 12 years ago

I've found Duolingo to work quite well, probably because it deals with entire phrases.

crncosta• 12 years ago

This is awesome! Kudos for the team/devel.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

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.

candeira2• 12 years ago

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!

candeira2• 12 years ago

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.

pcurve• 12 years ago

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.

desireco422• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

Hey desireco42, you might want to take a look at this website (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.

desireco422• 12 years ago

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

nosa_manuel• 12 years ago

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.

funktor• 12 years ago

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.

saurabh_math• 12 years ago

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

borplk• 12 years ago

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)

ilSignorCarlo• 12 years ago

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".

merrua• 12 years ago

I like memrise and anki myself.

thekaleb• 12 years ago

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".

drivers99• 12 years ago

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.

cupcake-unicorn• 12 years ago

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

A game to learn a new language

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