I’ve only come across @martin-harte occasionally in the Forum here, but I had also filed him away as a German for some reason. It’s not just you, @aran . Also, apologies, Martin - I’m not saying being German is bad, but saying that to someone who hails from the gorgeous country that is Scotland…
Also, Aran, re: best book: surely, surely that is Some sex and a Hill. Which I’d absolutely recommend to anyone on this forum who is learning Welsh and struggling with their confidence. Or to anyone else, for that matter.
If it’s helpful to know, the Romanian course seems to be very nice, but it is presenting sentences with words/phrases that have not been introduced yet.
Firefox does allow a user to add an app to the home screen but that didn’t make a difference.
I couldn’t find a setting in Firefox to allow background audio.
I’ve noticed while checking that the audio continues until the app waits for the user to respond. It won’t then move into the next phrase and it doesn’t matter how early or late the screen locks in the current phrase. It can be a soon as the phrase is spoken in English or as late the second model voice, it just never moves on to the next phrase.
@CalonGoch-Felen I’m extremely grateful to you for your kindness, but a little concerned about your taste
@michael-murray oh, thank you, that is VERY useful to know (and a bit of a headache to fix - we’ll give it a shot, but in the meantime the best thing to do is not to worry about anything that hasn’t been introduced, treat it as a glitch and know that it will be introduced and used more later on ).
@SteakAndEggs that’s frustrating about the settings - I’ll see if we can dig out any clues!
So, this might be a bit of a long shot, but it could be worth deleting the app from the home screen, adding it again via Chrome and then seeing what happens when you open it directly from the home screen. Sorry, we’re getting a bit desperate at this point
@SteakAndEggs unproofed beta version of Icelandic is up and available
@michael-murray we’re making some progress with Armenian - we’ll know in a few more days if we’ll be able to get it all the way through to a beta
Any more requests? We’re also hammering away at Ukrainian at the moment, but we’ve got a little bit of spare capacity (although I may have pulled the trigger on something else by the time you’re reading this!).
And while we’re waiting for more requests (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say!) we’ve rustled up Ukrainian as well - beta and unproofed as ever, but barring some words being used ahead of being introduced, it should be pretty good
The audio (and spacing) is much faster with these new courses than in the app. I’m assuming this is on purpose? It’s a little hard to keep up with, but maybe it’s in the 10% and I’m just used to being a little too comfortable.
Interestingly, looking at the purchase dates backs up what I said earlier about reading your ideas about language learning long before discovering SSiW:
Sing out! And that’s interesting about the spacing, that’s something that we’ll be able to look into more easily with the new app, so we’ll put it on the ‘to do’ list
I’ve had a bit of a go at the Greek, and liked it - I thought the fast pace was because I’d turned on the responsive pacing option, and was answering quickly, but it works for me - my rusty Greek means I already know most of the answers, but I’m not used to having to produce them that fast, and so I’m feeling the pressure (and the benefit). However…
I tried skipping ahead a few prompts, and found that I’d skipped a few belts, instead. That change seemed to be un-undoable, in that once I was on the Green belt, if I tried to go back to, say, Yellow, it would give me a couple of sentences and then suddenly chipmunk its way through a half dozen to land me back on Green. The only way I found to escape being trapped on something too hard was to reset all progress back to zero.
In my zipping back and forth through different levels of difficulty I did notice one definitely dodgy translation, and don’t know if it’s an exception that slipped through the net, or symptomatic of anything wider in the translation. (I’m hoping the former.) Basically, Greek and other Balkan languages don’t do berfenwau or infinitives, so when you mean “I want to learn,” what you actually say is “I want that I learn.” This means that the ending on the two verbs is going to match: I’m trying to learn Προσπαθώ να μάθω, she’s trying to learn Προσπαθεί να μάθει. But somewhere in there is a sentence like “We want her to try to say…” which is translated as “We want that she tries that I say…” - Θέλουμε να προσπαθήσει να λέω - instead of “that she tries that she says…”
My other problem is that you’ve got Icelandic coming onstream now, and I really can’t practise my Portuguese while trying to learn Irish, revise Greek, and turn Old Norse into Modern Icelandic, while neglecting my Italian. It’s not fair!
(Or, as my teenage child said when they heard me complaining about something else that seemed to them an embarrassment of riches, “Oh no! My steak is too buttery, my lobster is too juicy, and the diamond studs on my phone are hurting my fingers!”)
Definitely sounds as though we’ve got some unintended behaviour happening with belt movement, I’ll pass that on to see if we can figure it out, diolch yn fawr iawn.
Thanks for the heads up on the Greek, we’ll see if we can track that down - the medium term aim is to make it possible for volunteers to log in and delete dodgy stuff - and once we solve for that, we’ll try to figure a way to let people generate extra content as well (and to record where the voices just aren’t good enough yet (or available on the necessary platforms) like Breton).
Great news with the Romanian, thanks Michael!
We’re working on Scottish Gaelic at the moment - Arabic is listed as ready to be published on the current app so should be available very soon (but it’s one of our paid for courses - we will be bringing them over to the new app at some point, but it’s non-trivial).
I’ll get going on Bulgarian and Georgian next week and look at availability for some of the others - I deeply love the idea of doing some whistling languages, but that will definitely have to wait for increased turnover!
).
