What language would you like next? [formerly: A release! (Some fun things bubbling under)]

[aran]

Please forgive me for not having specific dates - after all our years of taking longer than expected with things, I’m no longer capable of using dates in any context, they just make me start whimpering…

But with that caveat out of the way, I thought you might like a heads-up that we’ve got some fun stuff on the way…

We’re just starting to test a new app, and we’re pretty excited about it. At first, until we can figure out all the headaches of migrating accounts, it’s going to be a showcase for our initial attempts to increase our number of free offerings.

Apart from just being nicer, it’s also got a new approach to listening work, something we’ve been wanting to solve for in the app for a long, long time. This new approach will get us back to the benefits of accelerated listening, but it will also minimise time we have to lose on revisiting old items.

Which is fabulous. But we’ve also got another listening approach under construction as we speak, about which I’m childishly excited. It’s an attempt to solve for a faster widening of non-core vocabulary - in other words, it’s our roll of the dice at trying to get people to C1 (or what most people would call conversational fluency).

And we’ve noticed that (because we have built it around the principles of comprehensible input) we can start to weave it in from the very beginning of the course.

I think this is going to be the most dramatic improvement to SSi courses since we first launched, and I am absolutely DYING to try it out with Irish as soon as possible.

That’s not the last exciting thing, though.

As a direct result of the new app, we’re going to be able to start updating and adding to the Welsh courses for the first time in over a decade. This means the two new listening layers, but it also means replacing the old Level 3 content with our latest work on seed sentences, which I think will be a massive improvement - as well as just being A LOT MORE content.

I know you’d like dates. I’m sorry. I’m not sure I can even remember how to write dates.

No dates.

But the first open testing will be quite soon

[aran]

And in less than a week…!!

We would love to have some early test users. And we’ll be HUGELY grateful for any input - at this stage, things WILL explode from time to time (or perhaps more often than that!).

But we currently have Dutch, Irish and a brand-spanking-new completely untested Turkish course (that I just built myself this week) available for free on our new app.

The plan is that our free courses will eventually be editable by volunteers (the main work is catching and killing weird phrases) - we’ve got a little tidying up to do before that will work, but in the meantime we can find/delete pretty quickly ourselves, so sing out if you see any candidates for deletion.

For the next couple of months, I’m going to focus on building free courses while Kai and Deborah do the more careful, rigorous work with our paid-for matrix. I’ll probably be able to do one or two a week. I’m currently spinning up Croatian (because we’re visiting in July) - any other languages anyone would like?

Oh, you want the actual url?

I still feel nervous sharing this

www.saysomethingin.app

[martin-harte]

Can’t wait for the Yoruba course Kai promised me a year ago.

Don’t go back and check. You definitely won’t find that he said no such thing.

@aran I have tried the first few minutes of the Irish course on that new app. I think you might want to take a look at the first sentence it teaches and compare it with your Manx challenge and specifically how you learned to say, “I want to speak Manx.” The resemblance is really cool.

[michael-murray]

Please do Romanian and Greek. Romanian is such a beautiful language, culture, and people group, but it lacks good material for learning. I personally know very many people who would be thrilled to see a SSiRomanian course.

[aran]

Yes, it definitely took me a while to let go of some scattered bits of Manx while I was kicking off with the Irish!

Yoruba - I think you’re not the only expression of interest - but I suspect we’re going to need to be ready for volunteers for that, I doubt the LLMs would do very well with it.

@michael-murray - I’ll put Romanian and Greek on my list to check availability for next week - should have one of them in production by the end of the week

[verity-davey]

Africa has been neglected thus far, so how about Igbo and Swahili?
Also, I still want to speak Cantonese with all the people who’ve come to Britain from Hong Kong.

[aran]

I suspect the African languages are underrepresented in terms of strong LLMs, but I’ll look into it. Cantonese should be do-able (although we haven’t built the learn-scripts tool we want to do for non-Roman scripts yet)

[verity-davey]

Not literally all of them. I just mean, as useful worldwide and in business as Mandarin may be, all the Chinese people I ever met spoke Cantonese, and I think that’s a common experience outside the financial district of London.

[verity-davey]

Lots and lots of humans speak the languages. Are you ever going to get back to recording with people?

[michael-murray]

I can’t even tell you how happy that makes me! Thank you!

[aran]

We absolutely will, if we can sell enough English courses to be able to afford it. The bulk of the 7000 languages don’t have voice models and don’t have the data to build them.

But the real block for us is the text generation - it’s literally a year or two of training and work to build enough phrases - which means we can’t afford to hire people to do it - but where there are decent LLMs, we can build an initial scaffold that volunteers can then help fine tune. That’s the plan, anyway

@michael-murray and that in turn makes me delighted!

[martin-harte]

Now that you have the courses approaching where you want them, it would be nice to see you do another Japanuary style challenge. It’s been well over a year since the original one!

You could try the new Japanese course or start a new language. You could do one of the new free ones on the new app or one of the big ones on the new version of the old app. You could all do the same language again or all 3 do different languages.

The possibilities are endless.

[aran]

We’ve been talking about the next intensive!

We want to finish adding some new stuff for listening work in the new app, and then we’ve got a model for a 7 day intensive - 5 days flat out in-app, day 6 in one-on-ones and listening to groups, and then day 7 in one-on-ones and maybe another radio type challenge. For this kind of stuff, I’m super keen to do completely new languages - but I am also really keen to test the new listening content to see how well it does at reactivating the bases that we built in Japanuary and with the Irish…

I also think it might be fun to do some ‘play along at home’ challenges with the free courses, but we need to get a few other things done before we’ll really have the bandwidth for that…

[Kai]

@martin-harte

Can’t wait for the Yoruba course Kai promised me a year ago.

How has it been a year!? I’ve been waiting for a proofreader to get back to me, I think… I’ll go give them a nudge…

[martin-harte]

I notice the new Croatian course is out. I’m only one person and maybe others would prefer to watch you do something else; but FWIW, I’d love to see you do the Croatian course in one intensive fortnight before your holiday, top up with tourist vocabulary from a phrasebook on your flight over and then throw yourself into speaking it as much as possible on your holiday.

Of course, what really counts for your choice is what gets YOU excited not us.

[martin-harte]

Oh goodness, that would amazing!

[aran]

That’s an intriguing thought. I’d been thinking about starting to do an hour a day with plenty of time to go… and I’m not sure I’d be able to organise a fortnight clear…

But what I might be able to do would be two or three sets of five intensive days, and that would be a big kick for us to solve our new approach for wider listening, which is going to be subject specific - thinking of making the first one an automatic choice, for bars and restaurants and the getting around stuff…

I’ll see how quickly we can get the new listening stuff added and then aim to do a kick-off five day intensive. What kind of stuff would you find it interesting to see from that? A daily ‘how it went’ kind of piece, or a few minutes of trying to use the language? I’m sure Catrin will be happy to film some attempts to use it on holiday (they’ll probably have the sound of Angharad laughing at me in the background ).

[martin-harte]

That sounds awesome. It has the added bonus of stress testing your ideas from way back in your H.I.L.T book..

Me personally, I enjoyed watching your Manx and Dutch challenges. If it’s a free language like Croatian, I would love to see more of that lengthier unedited footage. Walks in the Welsh countryside (which I remember in at least one video) while you practice would be an added bonus ha ha.

Of course, if it’s a paid language you choose in the end, you’d be mad to follow my suggestion and essentially give the course away for free on YouTube.

I’m probably a bit unusual, though. I imagine most people will prefer the kind of polished and carefully-edited content you produced for Japanuary (and I enjoyed that too).

I might just be parading my ignorance about all things video and audio editing here, but I want to guess that posting the unedited footage on YouTube probably doesn’t require much editing (please correct me if I’m wrong about that), in which case, why not post both?

Edit: fun fact: I bought and read your HILT book somewhere between 2014 and 2016 out of an interest in language learning and teaching and didn’t discover SSiW until February 2020 just before the COVID period! I didn’t put two and two together and realise you were the same guy until months later reading your blog.

[aran]

Oh, the whole thing?! You’re right, if the set up is okay it’s fairly easy to stream to YouTube - but not so much with the walking, very little signal around here!

For some reason, it feels like a heavier burden, though - I don’t think it’s really useful content, and I may just be past the point of being willing to be ‘on stage’ the whole way through intensive days

I’ll give it some thought, though Fun that the HILT/SSi link took a while to surface for you!

@michael-murray Romanian is up and running for you! - bear in mind this is all very much prototype work - we’ll be adding volunteer editing functions so that people can help catch hiccups, but they’re not quite ready. In the meantime, we think this approach has enough guardrails for the content to be reliable and useful, but there will be little weird bits here and there - but if you just ignore them, it’ll all work out

[martin-harte]

It’s more useful than you might think. The most important thing I found was that you sounded a lot like me! It’s one thing for Robo-Aran to make hs claims about mistakes, frustration and learning and quite another to actually see someone making mistakes and even sometimes feeling a bit frustrated when something won’t quite come out and yet not being deterred by that and still having fun. I remember around a year ago, someone posting in the forum who IIRC was worried about making tons of mistakes. I remember thinking: “but I’m making loads of mistakes in the Japanese course and still having a whale of a time!” The advantage I had over this person was that I had actually seen you making mistakes and hadn’t needed to just take Robo-Aran’s word for it.

However, I totally get your point about being ‘on stage’ for the entire process. The way you’ve designed this now, the process itself will be exhausting enough without that extra ‘on stage’ element (and, just as important, you don’t really want that extra extrinsic cognitive load when you’re learning).

So how about a less burdensome suggestion? Pick a 15-minute window (same time every day) each day and stream that. 15 minutes is long enough for us to see you make mistakes and not care and for us to see the process in action; and the 24-hour gaps will really show how fast your progress is. Does that sound less of a burden?

If you do it with Kai and your other Japanuary friend again, you could even take it in turns to be the one to stream the 15 minutes, reducing the burden further.

Anyway, whatever you decide, I can’t wait. I find these inspiring.