I wasn’t ignoring those previous discussions, but Chinese is hard for me and I’d rather wait until the mistakes are fixed.
I listened to the video below from a month ago. There are some mistakes in the Chinese. It particularly worries me when it uses incorrect tones (which it sometimes does) as I struggle with tones. To give one example, there is a sentence about not needing to buy a television again. In Chinese, “sell” and “buy” only differ in tone and it sounded to me like the female voice often uses the wrong one and teaches “sell” instead of “buy”. I wasn’t sure as tones aren’t exactly my forte, but I was later able to confirm with a native speaker that the female voice does indeed teach you to say that he doesn’t have to sell a TV again, because it uses 4th tone (the male voice correctly uses 3rd tone to teach “buy”).
I am very reluctant to study with the Chinese course because of this kind of thing; but I’m also very keen to study with it when these mistakes have been fixed. I haven’t complained about this and I’m not complaining now! I’m only asking for an approximate timeline if you have one. I really do support your decision to release these in beta and I think I understand your reasons. I also understand that you have other priorities to deal with first and, again, I am supportive.
Admittedly, this video was released just before the beta launch a month ago. Maybe these mistakes have already been corrected in the time since?
Again, I want to repeat that this is not a criticism, I understand and support your reasons for releasing languages in beta and indeed am currently studying Italian in beta; but I don’t want to study Chinese in beta while there are mistakes like these. These kinds of mistakes don’t worry me in Italian, where I think I can figure it out; but they do worry me in Chinese, where I’m not at all confident in my ability to figure them out as I’m not very good at tones.
I don’t actually work for SSi, I was just repeating what has been said. I must bow to your superior knowledge when it comes to Mandarin tones; it definitely sounds like that’s something that needs to be ironed out.
All I can add is the general prediction was that the beta label would likely stay in place 6 months at least, and given how complicated Chinese seems to be, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s longer.
There doesn’t seem to be much discussion of Chinese on the forum at the moment. Since mostly people post when they find problems, I think that means either nobody’s using the course, or it’s all running perfectly smoothly! So it might be worth your while trying the first few minutes on the app and seeing what you think.
Someone with inside knowledge will probably chime in on this thread soon.
Thanks for the reply. I think there was at least one person (or possibly 2) with some Chinese who expressed a willingness in the forum to “proof listen”. Hopefully she (or they) have been working away at that behind the scenes.
Just to be clear, though, I have no superior knowledge when it comes to Mandarin tones. Quite the opposite (which is the problem)! If I did have superior knowledge, I’d definitely go ahead and start the course now! I don’t want to give the wrong impression!
Hi tech team,
not sure if any updates/changes were done last night, but general performance of the new app seems a lot better this morning.
Based on using Spanish, French and German this morning.
Seems to load course quicker and allows you to start learning with less delay.
Didn’t experience any “spooling” during learning.
Seems to deliver each prompt without delay.
Written prompts more in time with spoken prompts.
Stats seem to be more in line with time spent learning.
On the basis of the above, I tried to load my Northern Welsh to test it, but that still won’t load (you have already explained the issue with the size of the learning record, but thought I’d give it a try).
Might be just a coincidence, or fewer people accessing the courses perhaps? But just wanted to mention how smoothly the app was running.
All the best and continued thanks for your hard work!
Hey there! Replying to a few bits I think are relevant to me:
In a way, yes - making the course itself is very very fast, so if I started today I could probably have it in beta by the end of the week (I don’t speak any Korean so I couldn’t really spend any time fine-tuning it), provided we had someone who speaks it available to approve it for beta (I do have some connections)! What’s really holding it up is that our Japanuary test has given us a great idea of where the process needs more guardrails and as a result we want to set at least a few of these up before we make the next languages. So the idea is that as we go along, any new Beta courses will be less bad than the early beta courses were in their early days Timeline-wise, very difficult to say, but I’d expect it to be one of the next couple of languages that come out. So hopefully it’ll release as one of the two we’re aiming to do in February, depending on how many other things need my attention…
Once we’ve implemented the post-Japanese guardrails, we’ll run all the courses through the process to fine-tune them a bit! However things like AI-mispronounciations will only go away when we’ve either had enough people go through it to test the course and report back anything they’re unsure about (such as “these two pronounciations are different - are they both right or is one wrong”?) OR we get a lot of money and can set up a proof-listening application of some kind… So the timeline depends on a few factors and it’s hard to say… Sorry!
We’re still very much dreaming of having a course for every single language, so, yes! But as it happens I do have a contact locally who wants to make this happen (especially through the medium of Welsh, and the other way round, but it’s easy enough to do English as well when Yoruba becomes viable). The main issue right now is Yoruba isn’t supported by the AI voice platform we use. So again, we’ll do it when it either becomes available OR we have the money to pay someone to record it directly.
Is there a way to reset all progress of a language and start that course again?
And is it possible to delete from the list of active courses those I just opened and tried but do not plan to do in the near future? Especially in case this has an influence on the app becoming heavier and slower…if not, I guess they can just stay in the list!
(The answers might be already somewhere in this thread but sorry, can’t find it!)
From time to time I have something similar happening, when switching from one language to another.
It’s just as if the app downloaded a few words/sentences, rather than just one at a time.
And if you switch on the go it’s just as if it had to just finish the set in the first language, before moving to the second - even though you already have the new flag and language showing on top!
I can’t get the app to work at all now. It was misbehaving a lot before, crashing all the time, but now I can’t get it to do anything at all for the last couple of days. I wondered is this common or is it because my phone is a bit old now? It worked much better to start with.
Mine’s been like that since the last update too, Even deleting and reinstalling the app only works for 5 minutes before it crashes again. I’ve been using a Heath Robinson workaround involving the web app to continue studying.
Might be worth tagging @rich and mentioning phone & OS version - I haven’t been having that experience (and I imagine most people haven’t, or there’d have been a more significant outcry), but that’s small comfort if you both have.
OK, that sounds quite extreme.- we have seen general sluggishness which has extended to delaying the text and making buttons non-responsive,…and there is good news on that front.
We have tracked it down to a particular function in the software we.used to track progress. We have changed the settings on this function and it makes a huge difference (this situation shows up and gets worse disproportionately with larger progress records).
We have a new build which we are planning to release with just this change early next week. Beyond that we are working on changing the way progress is recorded to substantially reduce the size of the learning record.
The present arrangement pre-dates the newer longer courses and the fact there are now so many!
Hey there, thanks for your comment! I’m in the process for gathering stuff for a next version which will have a bunch of these kinds of phrases removed
It was meant to kind of mirror the German where that would make it easier, but this is clearly too far
Thanks for replying!
Yes, the word order in the German course is definitely harder to pick up compared with the other courses, so I can understand attempts to help in that regard - though I do think that eventually it sorts itself out in your head mostly (although it’s rarely totally clear if you’re definitely wrong to use a different word order to the 2 AI speakers, or if the word order you said is also possible but not the choice made by the 2 AI speakers).
I’ll probably keep going with other courses for now and return to German later. Maybe I’ll give Swedish a go for now, or Finnish, since I believe you’ve worked on them a lot
Finnish is in fairly good shape quality-wise, but I’ve heard it’s pretty tough still - I’m looking forward to Tom and Aran’s intensive days so I can see how much (and more importantly where) they struggle so we can work on improvements. Also chatting to @brigitte tomorrow should help… And Swedish is about to get an update, hopefully this week, after which it should be pretty good!
I have to say that I’m really impressed and delighted with the number of people here not just willing, but actually really keen, to dabble in a variety of languages!
As someone who has spent a lifetime dabbling in various languages, it’s lovely to see our language-learning community growing in this way! Long may it last!
Timeline-wise, very difficult to say, but I’d expect it to be one of the next couple of languages that come out. So hopefully it’ll release as one of the two we’re aiming to do in February, depending on how many other things need my attention…
