Having said that…if you ever need to climb the wall of a shop in Wales, I’m your man!
@des-greene presumably to buy a few postcards
I’ll just tag @rich - I know he’s looking into this with the Tech Team
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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!
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.
What we’ve got here is an ordering issue. There are several ways in which we can get intermediates to a useful point for them faster than we do right now - but there are also a lot of other things we want to improve for all our learners.
Which means the harsh reality is that we’re not going to be prioritising intermediate learners until we’ve solved the other stuff. One of the tricky things about solving for intermediates is that there are (as far as interfacing with SSi is concerned) two different ways of being intermediate. People can be intermediate in terms of passive recognition of words, but still struggle to put four or five words together at speed, or people can be what we would think of as SSi intermediate. Those two types need different solutions, which makes everything a little trickier.
Quick quizzes to assess levels are a very shotgun approach for us, because even a small amount of ‘missed’ vocab can make the process extremely difficult and discouraging. So for example, if we do a very generalised quiz, and get a self-identified ‘level’, and stick them in at a certain point on our curve - and then they face a lot of phrases with two or three words that we happen to have introduced earlier, that they’re not familiar with - boom, it suddenly feels impossibly difficult.
We’ve got a strong conceptual solution - which we’re thinking of as v1.3 - which also solves for a lot of other issues around differences in working memory and experience of learning - but we need to do a full overhaul of the algorithm before 1.3 will make sense, so that’s unlikely to be before the end of the year.
For what little it’s worth, Tom and I will be struggling with exactly this experience next Tuesday, when we’re doing our first intensive day of Italian - I’d say I’m more A2 than genuine intermediate there, but I will definitely be finding quite a lot of stuff fairly easy. I’m broadly expecting that still to generate value in terms of improving my productive capacity, though.
Personally, I don’t think it’s difficult to arrive at content that is at a suitably challenging level using the app.
I started North Welsh when I was two thirds of the way through Duo Lingo. I’m beyond intermediate in Spanish but find it really helpful to get myself thinking/speaking Spanish after a break. I’ve just started French as a complete novice, and that is working for me too. I easily found my level in all of these.
So far I’m finding the new app far less “polished” than the old Automagic. Lots of lag, spooling, out of sync prompts etc. The Welsh has completely stopped working for me now, so returned to Automagic for that. I’m hoping issues such as these are nearer the top of the agenda than other “nice to have” features.
Still swear by it as a system though. So thanks for all your great work!
We don’t have these issues across the board, so I’m sure (if you haven’t already) @rich would be very grateful for any details you can give him - we are certainly very focused on making the experience as smooth and robust as possible as quickly as possible
Hi @des-greene,
We will have a look at your account - your Welsh is not working you say?..do you mean it is stuck, or something else? (We can look at your logs but it is always interesting to hear what you are seeing/ experiencing).
Picking up on the general point, we have many thousands of people using the App - and rising weekly - with no particular single issue at the moment.
The App itself is largely content independent - simply doing what it is told by the course content, and as you know we have many new courses at the moment via a new processs.
So, much of what has been going on in recent times has been refining the details of the course content which in turn makes the App work more smoothly, removes sync issues etc…and as a result the course content has changed significantly.
The App on the other hand has only had a couple of minor ‘Dot’ updates since it’s release. We do have a version waiting in the wings however which has some improvement in dealing with loss of signal…and a couple of other items.
Whilst the App is able to deal with loss and resumption of signal, there are what you might call edge cases where there is repeated loss of signal at just the wrong moment - I.e. that the App really cares about such as downloading the progress record…but when there are thousands of users the unusual becomes less unusual.
The true solution to this problem is for the App to become self sufficient / standalone - and it is en route to this. That will be the end of this type of problem.
Then it will be a question of refining course content which is happening at pace.
Sorry if that is a longer/ more general answer than you were anticipating!
Rich
Hi @rich
The issue with my North Welsh content is that in the new app it is stuck in an endless loop of about ten or twenty prompts. This always starts with “I am not intending to trust you to play”. Even if I use the fast forward arrow or reload the course it returns to the same spot. As I said above, if I use the old Automagic, my North Welsh runs fine.
If that could be fixed, I’m happy to feed back any other issues, but they are only minor things. But I don’t believe they are caused by connectivity issues, as I’m on a fast and reliable connection.
Cheers
Des
Hi @des-greene
Oh right - well good news I think on that one as there is a bug which is fixed already in what we call ‘infinite play’ when you have reached the end of the course.
It is in the version which is waiting to be released - this will happen during the coming week - we are just waiting on tests of another aspect to be completed.
Thanks for your feedback which is invaluable in helping to find the last few things and improve the App moving forward.
Rich