Comment by grbsh
2 years ago
Wow, I just tried it, and this is exactly what I’ve been looking for (something that actually makes you think conversationally, not just memorize vocabulary).
Love the rebrand, by the way - I saw your posts about Quazle, and I never wanted to try it then for some reason. Can’t really explain it, but I guess that’s the power of branding right?
One suggestion I would have is that it takes a while when I click on a word to get a definition. Is there a way you could preload definitions on device to make this faster? Sometimes I want to click like 7 words in a row, and I don’t do that now because it’s so slow.
Yeah, as a technical person, I was also surprised by what a big impact branding can make.
Re:loading You can click on the message itself and you'll get the translation of the entire message. Preloading the translation of every word would be a bit costly, but we could probably squeeze a bit more performance out of it.
Also, I wouldn’t really worry about Duolingo - they cater to people who want to _feel_ like they are learning a language (for 2-5 mins a day), not people who actually want to make progress. Even if they release features like this, they won’t be competing with you. Duolingo is also the worst example of inappropriate gamification I’ve ever seen.
Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something. That’s important.
I noticed in this app, trying a language I don’t know, I immediately get blocked on lesson 1 step 2 - my answer is wrong, but I know nothing and there are zero mechanisms to learn without prior context to guess and extrapolate upon.
> Duolingo is good at going from nothing to something
Seconding this. I got noticeably better at Chinese after using duolingo every day. I feel like I hit a ceiling now and it's not helping too much, but it definitely worked.