Having said that…if you ever need to climb the wall of a shop in Wales, I’m your man! 
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@des-greene presumably to buy a few postcards 
I’ll just tag @rich - I know he’s looking into this with the Tech Team
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Have there been any updates on this issue? I’ve had to return to the old Automagic app (which is still working fine).
I just tried to convince a friend to sign up for the French course. She gave it a look, and pointed out that there’s no way for her to find the right level for her. She’s not a beginner, and the idea of just skipping forward until she finds what might be the right place was a real turn off.
I can’t say I blame her, really. The lack of any situational awareness about where you are in the course is a bit of a turn off for me. I liked the old course, where you had a clear sense of progress, and could skip back and forth at will, and know where you’d end up. Automagic has its advantages, but I don’t like it that I feel completely unmoored, with no sense of how much is behind me and how much in front. That kinda stops me using it, tbh.
I think if you want to tap into intermediate learners, there is going to have to be an on-boarding process that works out what your skill level is and gives you the right entry point in the course.
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I believe a bug was found that was causing this. It’s being fixed and tested, and will be passed through to the Live system soon.
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I completely agree @suw. At the moment, Automagic isn’t really attractive to anyone other than complete or very new beginners, because the navigation process is unusable.
But for me, there’s another important way in which Automagic is a step backwards in functionality from the Old/New course: it seems to have lost the ability to be able to learn ‘hands-free’ – or more accurately, ‘screen-free’ – because the rewind / play/ skip buttons don’t work with headphones or with car players. Or at least I can’t find a way to make them work reliably on iOS. The old app works perfectly, every time, so that’s what I continue to use.
BTW: the advice given to download the files from the site and listen to them on an MP3 player doesn’t work, of course, because the rewind / forward buttons only take you to the beginning of this or the next whole track: useless for skipping back or forward a few seconds, which is what is actually needed.
This is important, because Old and New courses work as well as they do partly because you can use them while doing something else – walking the dog, ironing, driving etc. The methodology itself is great, of course, but it’s the combination with the screen-free learning that really takes it beyond other courses for me.
It means that you’re not tied to dedicated sessions in front of the screen / a book – which are always harder to find time for, of course – so you can practice for longer and more often than you could otherwise. The ‘screen-free’ option is therefore for me an important learning and motivational multiplier and I know I wouldn’t have made nearly as much progress, so quickly, without it.
Despite its obvious benefits, Automagic seems to have lost that important advantage. I presume there are technical problems causing such basic features not to work, but I really hope it’s fixed soon – I’d like to try out the new languages.
Sorry if this appears unduly negative – I really do wish SSIW the best with Automagic, and I hope that we’ll see these teething problems sorted out soon.
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To be fair that depends a bit on your player. Many mp3 players just skip back to the start of the track, but some also have “press and hold to rewind” functions. But the whole concept of rewinding is ancient now, I suppose. Remember the sound cassette tapes made when you did it? 
I haven’t listened to my old cassettes in a while.
Some media apps on phones and computers have a default “back 10 seconds” button too, I believe.
I try not to touch the controls at all when I’m using a challenge/lesson. Pause if someone interrupts. Maybe take it back a few seconds when I restart. But if I didn’t quite get something, no worries. Everything repeats.
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I agree with the point about accessing the course when someone isn’t a complete beginner, although TBH the SSi approach pretty much always was “we do things differently, so start from the beginning and go fast until you start finding it harder” - even with the Lessons and the Challenges.
However, I agree with @verity-davey about the hands-free nature of the new courses: I tend to just stick them on in the car and listen hands-free without any issues. The only problem I did have was when I had a “do you want to take a break or reset the timer?” popup hidden by Google maps, so the course kept stopping every few minutes without me knowing why. I think that pre-emptively closing the app completely, and then opening it before the journey would have prevented that.
Well, I wasn’t actually referring to the new courses. I use the mp3 files.
Oh, I try not to go back if I don’t have to. Once I learnt to trust the system, sometime around Challenge 10 in Level 1 of the New Course, I managed to get through all three levels of both the New and Courses with only repeating a entire Challenge now and then. I’m fully bought into the ‘plough on regardless’ ethos – because I knew I could go back and repeat the last few seconds, or choose specific entire challenges any time I wanted, I often didn’t need to.
But there are times when it’s necessary to stop, when the dog decides to ‘explore’ in the woods, or someone decides they want to chat, and when it’s useful to rewind a couple of sentences to catch the English without having to get the phone out. I was confident to plough on because this safeguard was there, if you like.
As far as can tell, you can’t do that with Automagic – I’ve not tried it in the car, but it definitely doesn’t work for me with headphones. Given that there’s no control over in what you repeat in Automagic, that seems to make screen free operation much less attractive.
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I remember rewinding an entire c120 cassette with a pencil because my first cassette player was (huge, expensive) battery only and it would have drained the entire thing…
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Having used the old files, the old app, AutoMagic and the latest app I agree with all of these points.
We’re not intending to lose the hands-free functionality and there are lots of things that the app doesn’t do that we want it to do yet.
And there are a lot of behaviours that are known issues that we are working on.
My advice for doing any of the new courses, that are ONLY in the new app, is to just keep going.
Try to avoid hitting skip or revisit.
We don’t have a good solution for intermediate learners other than
‘just keep skipping through until it starts feeling pretty hard’
The courses are much deeper and wider than the old courses, so pretty much wherever you start won’t matter in the end, it will just matter at the beginning.
But please be assured that we are working very hard to address all of these issues.
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Thanks, Thomas,
I do appreciate that things are not alway possible immediately, often for technical reasons that users don’t know about (and don’t need to know, usually…). It’s enough to know that the issues are recognised and will be addressed in due course.
Cheers!
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The problem there is that people just won’t. There needs to be a different onboarding process for intermediate learners, if that’s a cohort you want to attract. I could imagine some sort of quick quiz to assess your level might do the trick.
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