Can’t even begin to express how excited I am about this.
It’s been in the works since the tail end of 2019.
I think it’s going to transform how many people achieve success with SSiW.
AutoMagic (with AI faces for fun).
It’s like an exercise bike for languages. You log in, let us know how you’re feeling that day (which changes how hard we make you work) and then do as much or as little as you want. As simple as that.
It’s going to be available initially as an iOS app and a web-app. We’re making it available to the teachers in our education pilot and adult education tutors on the 5th of September, and then to their students (including everyone starting Mynediad this year) on the 12th of September, and then when we’ve ironed out the inevitable wrinkles that will crop up, we’ll be rolling it out to all learners - probably in October.
If the school trial is successful, this could be a path to achieving language confidence in Welsh for all students in English medium schools, which is breath-takingly exciting.
Here’s a screenshot from the (not quite finished yet) iOS app:
With lots of fun extras on their way as well, made possible by the new approach - comparing your stats against friends, comparing different areas, seeing how much learning time has been put in by people you’ve invited to SSiW (so tracking your contributions to reaching the million) - and then next year we’re going to be starting the work on assessing your accuracy per phrase, which will help us customise even further and improve results even further…
Also - almost forgot! - AutoMagic includes an entirely new set of pieces of advice, developed over the last three seasons of Iaith ar Daith as I’ve been doing 1-on-1 intensive training with a bunch of different celebrities - I found out during that work that however successful people have been, there are still some things that feel extremely difficult to everyone learning a new language, and there are some pieces of information that can trigger a huge mindset shift which makes success much more probable. I’m really, really looking forward to feedback on all this new material - genuinely can’t wait to get it out there
This is so exciting and motivates me to go back to ssiw which I have let lapse partially as I felt I could not connect with local learners but hoping now meet ups started I might feel inspired again!
That’s particularly inspirational for us, Roxanne, thank you so much - it’s very much our hope that this is going to be a step change in how many people achieve success with SSi
Hi Daz - I think (and hope) it will - we’ve got a highest level setting which will be a very fast rate, and should get usefully challenging as a refresher pretty quickly - but this is untested as yet, so we’ll be particularly interested in feedback from this angle
I struggled up to lesson 15 in welsh then delayed progress a bit then a bit more then a bit more.
Still fascinated by the contend and your Aran’s enthusiasm I switched to Spanish, up to a mid point then o dear, delayed a bit. isn’t life funny?
As an author of self-learning courses for a major European airline when e-learning came into vogue, I’m really excited to see what’s going to be on offer
uh-oh does this mean SSIW will change to have video playing on it- if so I’ll no longer be able to use it- I daren’t click on the link as it looks like it does have a video on it- I’ve got Menieres and any moving images on computer can (and does) trigger vertigo attacks. Does it have video that has to be watched or is it just one of the extras? Sorry to be a pain
Thanks for letting us know! Super valuable - we’ve been planning a ‘non -video’ option for a number of reasons, but were still tending to think in terms of waveforms - I’ll flag this up now and make sure we offer a zero moving visuals option
oh thank you so much Aran - seriously - diolch yn fawr! I was so upset when I saw the message about the change- people tend to know about some people with epilepsy and flashing images- but someone with Menieres may have the issue with scrolling / moving images- it causes such a severe attack of vertigo with me that it is a “drop attack” - bad enough if you’re sat down but I had one standing up recently and crashed to the floor. It means A LOT to me that you’re doing a non-moving version- I was so worried I’d have to stop using SSIW and really don’t want to- I’m one of those folk who believe they were meant to learn Welsh- I think it’s in my genes from my grandfather! Thanks Aran.
