A laugh out loud post there @RichardBuck. All of things have been mentioned EXCEPT the seductiveness of Aran’s voice which has not cropped up before
I think @Deborah-SSi has a very short list of tweaks for Spanish at the moment - which is looking in pretty good shape.
We have 2 languages in Alpha, behind the scenes, at the moment and another getting a lot of attention.
There is a ‘Dot’ release going on at the moment - which has been approved by Apple first (unusual!) and is on the streets for iPhone already. But it is a pretty low profile release I suppose for this platform with some bug fixes and extra flags ()!
On Android it fixes the pop up error message related to foreground / background services and involved upgrading a library to cover some Android versions’ later releases.
They have also upgraded their approval process it seems as we have had to submit a video to show how we are using these permissions (which is reassuring in a way). So we are on Round 2 with them and that is showing ‘in review’ at the moment.
There might be something else for you to test this weekend but it isn’t a language… I’m just.waitimg for that to go through it’s final paces too.
Just checking in to pass on some feedback after using the French version of the app for a couple of weeks (have progressed almost to Blue belt without skipping any sentences).
On the positive side- I can sense that it’s really helping my spoken French (which has languished WAY behind my comprehension and writing/reading ability for years).
On the less-positive-side, I’m finding the algorithm WAY more repetitive than SSiW levels 1-3 for some reason.
e.g. the phrase ‘I’m a little tired but I want to speak French with you’ must have cropped up way over 100 times so far, whereas some phrases have cropped up a while ago but haven’t been repeated at all yet.
Also, as others have said, the same ‘brain’ anecdotes are being repeated numerous times.
Plus there are some Italian pronunciations creeping in here and there for no apparent reason ‘Dir-eh’ and ‘Diffi-chil-eh’ spring to mind.
It’s obviously nearly there as a finished product, and it’ll be great when it’s been tweaked, but if I’m being brutally honest it’s only my love for SSiW that’s keeping me pushing through with the French version at the moment.
Hoping that my feedback will help you smooth some of these things out and help you finesse the French version that I know you’re capable of making.
Yep, I think we have some spaced repetition ( in a good way) appearing in the comments.
The spaced repetition which gets a bit stuck (we are already tweaking thus)
Encouragement repetition is on the list
For the App itself, at a headline level, that is pretty much the list…and on the French…
There is a new version of French on the way…
There is a process for generating the courses which is continually moving forward and the current French course came out of an earlier version of the process than the Spanish, say, which is quite a bit better.
I think that course generation process will continue to evolve and become more and more refined.
As a general update the Android increment is still at ‘in review’ status this morning so they are obviously a bit busy at the moment.
Idea for a Sci Fi story: AI language course goes rogue and begins to seduce a polylingual population with stories about their daughter in her thirties who works for the council.
Having manual updated it now works as expected on Android 14 when the screen sleeps and is woken. Now to put it to the test without hammering the life out of the battery.
Thank you!
So, I suggested there may be something new to try and here it is…
… 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
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.)
I tried out the web app, it really is very exciting. I have some thoughts to share (hope that’s OK).
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.
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)?
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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).
. All of things have been mentioned EXCEPT the seductiveness of Aran’s voice which has not cropped up before 
)!
I’m just.waitimg for that to go through it’s final paces too.
