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

Welsh General / Questions
#44

Im glad this is bringing inspiration and joy to Aran and others :slight_smile: I really hope that it all works out well.

It does make me a little sad that SSiW is moving away from native-speaker planned and recorded content to computer-generated voices and sentences. I’m sure they sound natural and very impressive. But there was always something wonderful about knowing that you’re listening to real people with a passion for educating about the language. And of course, that you’re supporting the work they do. I struggle to feel excited about AI-generated courses produced en mass in the same way, expecially when they’re taking work away from translators and voice artists etc. And it’s hard to know where the AI got it’s data from (whether it was given freely, or taken without asking, though I do trust SSiW to have worked to prevent the latter <3)

This is just my opinion of course, and I really do hope that it turns out well. I can see the appeal of a huge array of courses following the SSiW method. Heaven knows it’s an effective method. I think I’ll stick to the recorded ssiw Cymraeg courses I know and love though.

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#45

Is there anything new or exciting coming for SSiW subscribers at all in the future?!

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#47

No, it wouldn’t! [It feels quite exciting to be saying something like that]. We’ve got French and Spanish content built and audio being produced, and we’re most of the way there with Italian - also hoping to have Portuguese done by the end of this week (er, that’s ‘done’ as in ‘ready to be available in the new app’ rather than actually launched, which we’re still hoping will be end of June but slippage is possible).

Then next week we’re currently aiming for German, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean - it may slip a bit, but those are the eight that I would confidently expect will be in the app when it launches :slight_smile:

Politely requesting a little more time for Sfyria and Silbo Gomero! :joy: But we absolutely will take that challenge on when we have a little spare cash - we’re currently in conversations with the Japanese government about a project with the Ainu language, which some people claim doesn’t have a written form and would therefore potentially nudge us into some similar conceptual solutions…

This really isn’t too far away. We have our English phrasebank ready, and the next step after the initial 8 new languages is to provide English through the medium of several other languages (in order to do some showcasing for the British Council) - it’s clearly timely and appropriate for us to make Ukrainian one of those interface languages (and to move to providing a Ukrainian course for English speakers not too long afterwards) :slight_smile:

I understand the sadness. I would encourage you not to see it in quite such black-and-white terms, though - we’re not ‘moving away from native speaker content’ - we’re moving towards much more of it, by using the tools available for the largest languages to fund development of courses for all languages. Once we get outside the top 100 or so languages, it’s very likely that almost all of the content will need to be freshly recorded, which will create new spend in small languages that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.

And this process isn’t even taking work away from translators and voice artists - because we didn’t have the money to commission that work, so it didn’t previously exist. :slight_smile:

Yes! Firstly, all these new languages will be available as part of your current subscription, at no extra cost. Secondly, in terms of provision for Welsh, we’ll be pushing through to get Level 3 included in the new app (we never managed to get beyond Level 2 in AutoMagic, for a variety of reasons) - and we’ll also be moving fairly quickly (probably before the end of this year, although there’s a little finger-crossing in there) to make these new languages available to learn through the medium of Welsh (which would be a very interesting challenge for our more advanced Welsh learners) and to make Welsh available through the medium of these new languages (which we hope will make it possible to start to create some social environments in which English won’t be available as a default language in common, something I think could be very powerful) :slight_smile:

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#48

OpenAI is basically an intellectual property laundering service, they’ve essentially admitted their business model depends on using copyrighted material without a licence, and I am not sure SSi could do anything about that. But it is the area I am least inclined to criticise LLMs on as I believe knowledge should be free and available to everyone, and just maybe this will be the reason we finally get a long overdue shake up of the whole copyright system.

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#49

But seriously, there are languages in that top 50 (Icelandic, Greek) and even in the top 8 (German, Portuguese) where I’d really welcome the SSi approach of making/enabling you to rapidly reach the point of thinking in the target language. (I’m still pushing for Scots Gaelic, Kalderash Romani, and Guernesiais, mind you.)

One question re design of the new app: assuming it’s on Automagic-but-better lines, to what degree will it provide for speeding/jumping ahead if someone is revising/not starting from zero in a given language?

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#50

I think there will be some interesting and important battles around ownership of voices and art and so on, but I’m very much inclined to agree with language as owned by humanity in general :slight_smile:

We overlap on the Celtic languages, so you can expect movement there sooner rather than later! And that will force us to do some of the structural work on how we open up the course production system to work with crowdsourcing, at which point it will all come down to whom you can inspire :wink: [We’re currently thinking (and it’s very much my desire) that crowdsourced courses would naturally be free to use].

We have a ‘skip’ function which we think will broadly work for this [er, where this = your comment about getting to intermediate content!] at the moment - we have to juggle between ‘actually competent intermediates who need to move quickly to appropriate content’ vs ‘intermediate on paper but have never said more than five words together out loud’ who need to be nudged into not going too far ahead and then losing their will to live…

Next year, I hope we’ll have moved on to what we’re thinking of as version 1.3 of the app, where we start paying attention to user behaviour in a way that helps us tailor the content to the user - when we get this working well, we’ll also be able to build a tool to let people showcase their existing skills in order for us to do better at starting them on appropriate content :slight_smile:

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Courses through languages other than English
#51

Diolch yn fawr iawn!

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#52

Hi Aran, great news! It seems like years since I last posted here and I’m really glad to see you’ve had such a breakthrough. I’m looking forward to tidying up my Italian to the point where when someone asks me something in Italian, I don’t automatically reply in Welsh :roll_eyes:
Pob lwc,
Andy

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#53

Yeah its not the sound of the generated voice, Ive just got an extremely bad feeling about this particular genie.

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#54

This all sounds amazing, @aran!
But, how dare you pick Korean as one of the first ones?! I am trying to focus on one language at a time and this is not helpful! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: (But seriously, Japanese and Korean have both fascinated me since I first found anime & K-drama online, and a functional affordable way to learn them is a dream come true.)
Okay, so, this is all very cool, so much to- German, Portuguese as well, so many languages- completely ignore until after I have Welsh settled in my brain. Right?
Right!
Btw, since it’s expecially relevant to some of the languages mentioned, having cultures which are even more rigidly polite than English royalty :wink: which will you teach first: informal/colloqial/familiar forms, or formal/ultra-correct/polite forms?
Personally I would always have wanted formal first since I did not start from a point of having Welsh-speaking friends or family with whom to practise… but then I actually thought about how it worked in the video chats I had, not knowing how to say much with chi and having to think about it more. It meant that a conversation where we’re both using ti feels easier, more comfortable, like the other person did something friendly by using ti… which is exactly what happened. Imagine if learners were always wanting to default back to chi because that’s more deeply ingrained. Not a great way to feel relaxed with new Welsh friends when we make them!
So informal first is very natural, much like a child would learn which is usually a good thing for language learning… Yet… if you’re taking a trip to Japan and trying out Japanese on strangers… you probably will need to be very polite to them.
What is your solution?

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#55

Wow! All languages, everywhere, all at once! :smile:

I’ve been looking forward to additional languages since the Spanish courses.

Having experienced how great the SSIW method is twice, I really think this could be transformational for learners everywhere.

And using AI to give people skills rather than replace them is a hopeful sign of how we might harness it for the future.

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#56

@andygildon I will be VERY disappointed if we stop you from answering Italians in Welsh! :rofl: But I must admit I’m also looking forward to the Italian course immensely - and the good news is that it had its first mini-trial last night (with Tom’s mother) which was very encouraging…

@verity-davey Yes, it’s a complicated old set of decisions - apart from the ordering, we also need to make sure that we’ve got consistent markers that let people know which to use, which is tricky - I suspect there isn’t a single perfect solution - until we reach three point (maybe a year or two away) of being able to let people choose which they want to start with. It’s possible we’ll be going out to Japan to talk about a language rescue project with Ainu, in which case we’ll get the chance to ask for advice…

@ianblandford Young Blandford! Lovely to see you! Also, the new Spanish content will go a LOT further than L1/L2 - we estimate that it’s at least 100 hours of learning if not more, so you’ll be able to kick on massively with your Sbaeneg :partying_face:

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#57

@aran I’ve been away too long! I’ve let my language practice slip in the last few years so the opportunity to learn new stuff will be a kick up the bum for me to get out there and use both my Welshpool and Spanish more.

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#58

Welshpool?!? Lol

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#59

That’s what Ryan Reynolds is going to turn into if he spends much more time in Wrecsam :wink:

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#60

Gotta love Autocorrupt.

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#61

With so much being done via AI, will there be anyone tutor-like able to run group chats, answer questions on the forum, signpost events and other resources etcetera, for languages other than Welsh? (I just realised I don’t even know what there is currently for Spanish.)

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#62

This is currently very unlikely - it’s always been something that we couldn’t easily afford for Welsh, but Welsh is our central labour of love.

If we can get the financial side of things to work, we’d certainly be keen to offer this kind of support, and to build extra ways for social interaction - but as even the biggest companies find out, creating healthy and positive social environments online is a huge, huge challenge. It’s certainly not going to be a ‘near future’ thing (I have a faint hunch we may end up providing above and beyond like this for the Celtic languages only, but we’ll see).

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#63

Celtic languages only would be totally understandable, and fair. Much as I wish success to the larger business, they must remain the priority because they are the heart of the whole thing.

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#64

Excited to see Gujarati on that list :smiley:. There’s currently no decent apps for learning Gujarati, so it would be amazing to see a Say Something in Gujarati course one day :crossed_fingers:t4:.

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