Big news - exciting times - finally, finally we're moving on other languages

Hi Rich,
when will you reset my account ? Or did you find another solution ? Should I deinstall the App and download the new version ?

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Hi @brigitte

I sent you a private message - possibly yesterday - or the day before, just to check - because you have a lot of progress!

Should we delete 3 weeks or something like that - is that OK?

Thanks

Rich

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That’s OK. I don’t mind to repeat, but I don’t want to have the Same 5 phrases every 5 minutes

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Hello, is the new app going to synchronise progress with the web version? Thanks!

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Hi @janus

Yes it is.

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

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To my considerable distress.

:rofl:

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So, I suggested there may be something new to try and here it is…:drum:

… with all the caveats above - this is the browser version of the App.

So you could give it a go if you are feeling in an experimental mood.

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

P.s. Essentially this is exactly the same code (and courses) as in the handheld version. ( In particular it doesn’t have the encouragements fix in it quite yet; and work is in progress on the spaced repetition stickiness issue.)

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I tried out the web app, it really is very exciting. I have some thoughts to share (hope that’s OK).

  1. It’s difficult for some people to get time alone if they don’t have their own flat. In my case, I usually go outside to find a place to practice alone. In the long-term, will the app eventually have an offline mode that allows you to sync progress when you get back home? I realise that’s not a priority right now, I just wondered if it will be technically feasible at some point.

  2. I tried out the French one and was a bit intimidated that I couldn’t hear any difference between the vowels in “je” and “veux”. This is definitely my ear rather than your app; but it got me thinking: have you built in any extra support for languages with very difficult phonologies, such as French, Irish or Chinese? Or do you have confidence that the SSi method is so robust that all the sounds will still fall into place for learners eventually (albeit that it might take a bit longer)?

  3. I checked out the Spanish. Although I studied Spanish for many years and lived in Spain for a little over 2 years, my Spanish is very rusty. When I left Spain in 2016, my Spanish was much better than it is now- and it was never perfect. With that caveat, here are some thoughts:

  • I love that you have integrated some subjunctives into the course very early.

  • The voices sound very clear.

  • As always with SSi, the sentences are exactly the kind of thing you can imagine wanting to say (your method has long been amazing for that)

  • I’m slightly amazed by just how often Aran pops up to say that this is very hard work for the brain and that’s why it makes you learn so quickly. Easy enough to skip, though.

I’m nervous about the next two, in case I’m wrong:

  • A few possible mismatches. For example translating “I can manage myself” (which makes me think of someone rejecting help with his suitcase on the street) as “puedo manejarme sola”, which to me (and I can’t emphasise enough that I might be wrong about this) puts me in mind of a professional discussing her skills. Overall, the translation feels too literal to me (for example, using “manejarse” and I feel like a natural Spanish equivalent might not even translate the “can” and that there would probably be a “ya” at the begining. As I said, I might be totally wrong, my last conversation in Spanish was 8 years ago; but better to raise it and be wrong than to chicken out of raising it and risk being right.

  • Possible mistake: I was surprised that the AI directly translated, "If you can speak more slowly, that would be great as "si puedes… sería… instead of si pudieras (= if you could). As mentioned above, my Spanish is very rusty and was never perfect, so maybe you really can do that in Spanish and I’m totally wrong; but it might be worth checking. TBH, I genuinely think “could” sounds better even in English.

  • As soon as I stopped pressing “skip”, there was a lot more repetition than in previous SSi courses I have tried. Like really a lot. Not sure if that level of repetition is necessary for a language like Spanish (edit: I see in your post above that you have already fixed it for the phone apps), although I actually think it would be very useful for languages totally unrelated to English.

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Great! I’m glad you liked it - yes, of course, we love to hear people’s comments.

Yes it will…the handheld version will be able to cache a course and upload progress later.

@Deborah-SSi and I are doing a job-share - I’m doing technical - Deborah is answering the language comments :grin: which she is testing and feeding back.

The way the later stages of the course generation process have evolved has been as a result of being able to deal with different types of language - can’t tell you more! :wink:

There is a bug here - the first of the two headline bugs - which is fixed but has not quite reached the production version of the App. It will almost certainly be released this week.

There is lots of discussion about this above. This is the second of the two headline bugs - we are in the middle of fixing this one at the moment.

Thanks for the feedback!

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you very much for the kind reply!

The bit about dealing with different kinds of language is intruiging!

I want to go against the consensus a little and say that the extreme extra repetition might have a place with some languages. For example, I have tried studying Chinese and I find I need an absolute ton more repetition than for Spanish, German, Welsh, Manx or Cornish (with Indonesian falling somewhere between the two poles).

Constantly repeating the same sentences and sentence fragments is exactly what I need (not sure how typical I am) in order to improve those tones.

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Repetition is tricky because the requirements are always different from individual to individual (and often different for an individual from day to day!) - we’ve got some lines of thought about how to fine tune this (without giving you a complicated mixdesk of options!) which will start to come to light in the next-but-one release of the app (which will be a fairly long way into 2025, I would imagine).

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Speaking of French…

I had just opened it and heard the intro and a couple of sentences when I downloaded the app a couple of weeks ago.
I tried it today and it started back from the intro…allez allez! :sweat_smile:

Then I clicked on skip a few times.

From time to time I checked which words and sentences were being presented.

Some combinations of words and translations are a bit odd (I know it’s because they’ve been extracted from a sentence in which they worked this way, and I spotted a few little mistakes (like “no, I” being pronounced “noee!”) . and you might all be checking these aspects of the course so I’m not going to focus on the content at all, just on the practical side of the app as an user.

If I carry on, at normal speed or skipping, it presents many new words and expressions.
But longer sentences seem all about being ok and speaking French. :thinking:
Not sure if this is the same as @brigitte was saying?

I currently have the one year subscription that was offered if you registered to any Dysgu Cymraeg course. But my account is still the one from summer 2018, and it needed some tweak to start the new subscription and get the Automagic working.

p.s. Not an app-related issue but every time I hear Aran’s voice my brain goes on automatic translating to Welsh even though I learnt French in school and spoken it way more than Cymraeg) :rofl:

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I’ve been using the app and have quit a lot of trouble with the app “freezing” between sections. I’ll get it to work and then after a block section of introducing a new pattern and repeating some of the previous patterns, it’ll then freeze and not move onto the next “block”. It’s not a connection issue so not quite sure what’s happening. The only way I can usually get it back working again (although it doesn’t always work) is to try and close the app and re-open or log out and log back in or sometimes just close it down and leave it for a while and try again later. This has only really been happening for the last few days. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app but that doesn;t seem to have done much.

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Interesting, we haven’t seen that one @daiwilliams.

We’ll have a look at the logs in the morning to see if we can see a performance issue on your account - thanks for letting us know.

Can I check whether you have the latest release from the relevant App Store, as we are correcting loys of little things as we go.

(It is just useful to know if this is something to do with the latest version.)

Thanks

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @gisella-albertini

Essentially we are waiting for a new French course which is on its way but something else has taken priority.

From the App point of view we have encouragements which have been repeating - we’ve corrected that but it has not been released yet - should be this week….and a spaced repetition that gets stuck on some items which we have also fixed and we are starting to test.

A very few people - Brigitte and one other - seem to have had a problem connected to the previous upgrade of French. If you are still hearing Allez Allez you may have this issue.

Let me know - we can reset your progress.

What do you mean about the subscription - different versions and the tweak?

Thanks

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

I think I have the latest version. I deleted and reinstalled the app a couple of days ago and noticed in the app store that it said that the app had been recently updated.

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Hi @rich

Subscription:
after registering to a Dysgu Cymraeg course I received a coupon for one year of free subscription to SSiW. I just remember that Ivan had to fix something for me to be able to activate it and linking it to my account (that I had since I started SSiW in summer 2018).
Just saying it in case there’s a difference between older vs newer accounts and/or “standard” subscription vs Dysgu Cymraeg “complimentary” subscription.

Oh I have the French course running in the background now and just heard it introduce “dire” pronounced like Italian! :smiley:

I guess that might be part of next batch of corrections. As for resetting progress, if you say you expect to release a new version, no need to reset it now I can just wait and see what happens with next update.

For now I can go back and see how I do with good ol’ Welsh in the Automagic version that’s new to me!

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This isn’t directly connected to the new app launch (where we think we’ve got a v7 of the approach which catches pretty much all the problems that you’ve helped us find, so we should be into publishing mode from next week onwards for new languages)…

But I thought you might be interested…

Tom (who is currently being our course creation magician) was up here for a couple of days this week, and we were playing around with some of the latest versions of AI - and we have what looks like a really strong candidate solution for weaving our old listening exercises into the app, and dramatically improving them.

I’m very, very excited about this - at the moment, we think we’re looking at a path through to very confident understanding of podcasts in the target language, which I think is the kind of practice that will help people get to C1 much more quickly. It also looks as though a side effect of what we were doing yesterday will also let us automate producing learning content for subject specific areas (like the health sector, for example) which I think is also going to be enormously valuable. It is genuinely extraordinary the kind of stuff that Tom can charm AIs into producing.

So all in all, quite an exciting week! :wink:

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I know theres a long way to go, but subject specific courses is super exciting!

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I think we’ll reach a point where we can let people choose from a range of subject areas and fine-tune the learning content as a result - and from what I saw yesterday, it’s conceptually possible that we’d be able to let people request new topic areas, and be able to provide the content automatically, but that isn’t going to happen overnight. We should make some progress with subject specific stuff in general before the end of next year, though :slight_smile:

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