While sitting in Colwyn Bay waiting for Angharad to finish her performing arts group, I’ve been wrapping up a little experimental game - I think it’s time to see if it will cope or explode with a few other players on it!
It keeps score of the words you’ve shown you know, and it estimates what it thinks your total vocabulary might be (that estimation goes up or down depending on your mistakes!).
As you go, you fill in Wales county by country going up through the karate belts until finally you fill it in with the Draig Goch (which I’ve rather enjoyed doing). Then if you want you can take on England
But please don’t share - except in here! - while it’s still only on staging.saysomethingin.app - or you’ll be sending people somewhere that doesn’t exist yet.
And please shout at me about anything that doesn’t work!
When you’re happy with it, we’ll publish it properly
Oh, and if you sign up/login, you can change the look’n’feel on your profile page.
Oh, I forgot to say, it’s easy to play, but it’s not bloody easy to master! I got my brain melted a few times while I was trying to fill in England
If you find anything that really doesn’t work (there are still a few weird ones in there) just click on ‘none of these is correct’ and I should be able to kill them in admin
Hi Aran, had a go and enjoyed the game. I’ll do a bit on that everyday if its available. I enjoy the “script” on the new app as well. Used that quite a bit. My account is now through Dysgu Cymraeg becuase I just started a course and the app asks me to subscribe again if I try the “listening”. If I have to i’ll sign up to a paid subscription again to access that. Maybe i’ll message Deborah and ask what I need to do. But thanks for the new features. Personally think they’re very useful.
Love it. Growing my vocab and tracking it in Anki has been a massive motivator for me, “make big number bigger”, and has been my biggest growth post-SSI. After mapping Cymru, I scored 7,000, which is higher than I think my actual vocab is, but I still think it’s really cool!
What I think is most cool is that I got quite a few words right that I’ve never learnt, aren’t in my active vocab, and wouldn’t necessarily be able to use in a sentence, but I could make an educated guess at based on my understanding of other words, how words are compounded, and the meaning of different prefixes and suffixes. Getting to that point where you start to recognise patterns in how words are constructed, which helps figure out the meaning of words you’ve never come across before, much like we do in English
Really delighted you’re enjoying it, and thanks for being our very first testers!
@morgan1009 that’s just about the databases being separate - we’ll definitely make sure you end up with full access on the new app, it’s where all new users from the Canolfan will be going anyway
@reilly-featherstone super interesting to hear that, particularly better I’m not usually a vocab person myself - we’re giving some thought now into how to turn it into a ‘test your vocab or build your vocab’ kind of thing
I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time, so I think when it’s ready for primetime it will be a very, very useful tool.
I’m not sure if I like or dislike the fact that I’m pottering along quite nicely thank you, then get hit by an absolute “Wtf was that?” word.
I’m able to guess some of them though, so it feels like it’s measuring passive vocabulary rather than active. If you asked me to type in some of those answers in Welsh, my score would be a lot lower!! Might be interesting, in due course, to have a passive version and an active version.
Good fun. Pottering around 3,500 words which is more than I expected. Then suddenly jumped to 7,500 after last round. Either exceptionally lucky with my guess work or an overestimate. Couldn’t seem to sign in with my regular SSIW login credentials.
A lot of my vocab was learnt using Duolingo.
Great! Hope it’s alright for me to give my 2 cents? Of course, ignore if not useful.
There’s research that suggests that multiple-choice tends to test recognition rather than active recall and can lead to shallow learning, and this backs how I feel about it too.
To turn it into something for building active usable vocab, I’d want users stretching their brains to search for the answer and build that link.
Best way I’ve found to do this is to use a “flip the card over to reveal the answer” system, where you flip the card when you think you’ve got it, then mark right or wrong (which is why I use Anki). The issue with Anki is the barrier to entry of learning how it works, and making the vocab decks yourself etc, which is where SSI could come in with your own app that’s pre-made and specifically for Welsh learners.
I think that having multiple choice means you don’t have that same opportunity to struggle for the answer and therefore don’t build as strong of a connection.
And then of course algorithmic spaced repetition from then.
Yeah, this is entirely separate from your main SSi accounts - not even currently hooked up to the new app, although we’ll figure that out later on
Really delighted to see that you generally like it, that’s super useful input.
Yes, strongly agree about active/passive (I kind of love the wtf ones!) - I think the test game can stay okay with passive - the ‘build vocab’ mode will be designed to get to as active as possible (without actually being SSi!).
It’s the sort of thing I’ll bookmark and just nibble away at.
My estimated vocab is fluctuating between 18k and 25k, which is understandable given the way it works, and some mis-clicks on simple words. Doh. But I can guess a lot from just understanding how words are put together.
I got an estimate of over 21k on Scots Gaelic, which I’m quite sure is an over-estimate - but that is based on one round! (It’s a bit higher than my current estimate for Welsh based on three rounds, and there’s absolutely no way my Gaelic is better than my Welsh…) But it’s fun, and the multiple choice does actually make you work a bit at leveraging the parts of words that you recognise to make intelligent guesses at the ones you don’t.
ETA: after another couple of rounds of Gaelic it’s gone down to about 5k, which is (sadly) much more plausible (although there were some silly mistakes in there).
Oh, yes, I’ve had that mis-click rage! Made me want to shout at it
That’s super interesting @richardbuck - I think that kind of variation is a natural part of the flow, and kind of fun at the same time as sometimes frustrating - I could override it in some clunky ways, but my gut at the moment says let it do its thing
I’m currently getting about 32k estimated on Welsh - the maximum guess should now be about 42k I think - looks as though I may need to do some specialist vocab work (or probably not, given how naturally lazy I am!).
Thank you very much for the ‘none of these’ reports, I get a delete/retain option for each of those, which is very helpful for QA (although we did get one sudden collection from a non-logged in user who I think was treating them as ‘I don’t know’! - may need to think about that, perhaps add an ‘I don’t know’ button).
