Hi kantord, congratulations on the site! I tried something similar about 10 years ago, called wikibabel. I then joined with another site called wikiotics.org. We were very focused on libre everything. In the end, we gave up after several years, but our content is still up and we've been looking for a new home for it. Please take a look and see if any of it would be useful for you (we had built a bunch of cards very similar to your demo lesson). We had stuff in a few dozen languages, including audio recordings (mostly of low quality). I've moved on, but I still love the goal, and would be happy to share some feedback on the experience if you want (contact on my profile page).<p>In short:<p>- focus on what the user wants, not the tech.<p>- is English->Spanish the best language pair to start with? You're directly competing with the giants like Duolingo. I tried to learn Burmese a few years back, I would have loved to find something like this for that niche.<p>Good luck!
As someone who is learning Spanish at the moment, here is some feedback.<p>- I think a single click is sufficient to choose the correct answer and submit it; alternatively let me double click to choose and submit.<p>- I don't think a "Continue" step is necessary<p>- Without selecting an answer and pressing Back on the browser, the UI freaks out for a moment (Firefox 72.0.2)<p>- I love cheatsheets, so having a section for these would be awesome (finding good, consistent cheatsheets on the web is hard)<p>It is understandably a little sparse at the moment. Take a look at an app called Memrise - I think the style of its exercises would fit well here. I particularly like the "Fast Review" exercise which lets me do a speed review of all the words and phrases I have learned so far.<p>As others have mentioned already, it would be nice to be able to mark words you already know and stop them from showing. Additionally, being able to mark words you find difficult could appear more frequently.<p>I will keep an eye on this project; good work so far!
When my wife and I first met, we tried to build a language learning app (don't sign up, we stopped working on it) - <a href="https://llip.io/landing/" rel="nofollow">https://llip.io/landing/</a><p>To get users, we started a meetup group to teach people Korean. <a href="https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-Korean-Language-and-Culture-Meetup/" rel="nofollow">https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-Korean-Language-and-Culture-...</a><p>We stopped working on the app, but continued with the meetup group (3 years now and almost 1000 members).<p>Our conclusion is that the most effective way to learn a new language is a simple commitment to showing up regularly to language events. Meetup.com or your local public library will usually have regular (and free) events. Once you have that commitment, picking a great app will help expedite your learning.<p>Excited to see an open source language learning app!
I’ve been working on my own iOS language apps for quite some time:<p><a href="http://appstore.com/h4labs" rel="nofollow">http://appstore.com/h4labs</a><p>My original idea was to do lots of little games in one app to keep it interesting: Hangman, Word Search, 4 Pics 1 Word, ...<p>Recently, I’ve been breaking out the games into smaller apps. I think that’s better. Take your data and try to make some fun little games.<p>Also, I think noun gender is important. Should learn it at the same time as the noun. It can change the meaning of the word.<p>Finally, is anyone doing verbs? I have a simple Spanish verbs app. There are usually many rules to help make it easier.<p>I was going to open source the rules that I have but there doesn’t seem to be much interest:<p><a href="https://github.com/melling/Spanish_Verbs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/melling/Spanish_Verbs</a><p>Need to extract the data from my site:<p><a href="http://www.h4labs.com/lang/es/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.h4labs.com/lang/es/index.html</a>
One small piece of feedback : My (UK) keyboard doesn't have accented characters on it, and I don't know how to type them (well, I do, but many/most users won't), so typing "leon" instead of "león" for Lion wouldn't let me continue as there was a spelling mistake. Ideally, have an on-screen keyboard for accented characters, or instructions on how to type them, or less ideally allow spelling mistakes on such characters.
Cool! Please make sure to fix what I consider the major problem of Duolingo: it asks so much stupid questions (things I already know perfectly, even if I'm going to forget these tomorrow these still are nonsensical to repeat that much during the same session) I get bored and start clicking too fast so I make mistakes out of pure inattention and get even more stupid questions as the result.
Good idea.<p>I personally love Duolingo. But I fear that the course data, which is mostly user contributed, will eventually disappear if the company goes under...
I also wanted to congratualte you for your effors. I'm a daily and long time user of Duolingo and thought of libre alternatives for a while.<p>I'd agree with some sentiments in this comment section, that you might want to find a niche, as competing with Duolingo or Babbel would be difficult.
Duolingo doesn't too well with "smaller" languages and different scripts.<p>Are you using a TTS engine for the voice (I assume)? I was looking for TTS for a smaller language I'm studying, but I couldn't find anything. I hope that something comes out of the Mozilla's Common Voice project.
Great effort - my thoughts as a learner of Finnish and perpetual searcher for internet learning content is that the biggest issue facing any learning platform (commercial or open source) is content, content, content.<p>It takes a huge amount of effort to build decent course material - most open source material are from a community of people that are also using the material - will this be the case with language learning?
Completely tangential:<p>The Rosetta Stone / Duolingo style of language learning has never really worked for me; I generally have more success and an easier time staying engaged with the "comprehensible input" approach.<p>Are there any open platforms based on this method out there? Maybe something along the lines of LingQ, though perhaps without all the attempts at gamification.
I am far from the first to say this, but please do push hard for languages that aren't commonplace (or well-developed) on other platforms.<p>My language of choice would be Farsi.
Good work and the roadmap looks pretty promising. I hope we will see native mobile apps. Would be a cool case to play around with SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose.
Wonderful initiative. Would have loved to get involved but I really don't want to use GitHub. Any idea how people may contribute using other platform?