Comment by mariano54

1 day ago

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.

10 comments

mariano54

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55555  1 day ago

I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the latest events from the news. I think you should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data source like the news, localized to the user. There are global news APIs you can subscribe to.

  • Velorivox  8 hours ago

    I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).

    I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.

drakonka  1 day ago

Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level? (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the app).

My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate to fluent in the most efficient possible way (as opposed to just having us 'ramble' about random topics of my own choosing).

  • mariano54  1 day ago

    There is a structured curriculum that gets generated after the intro lesson (if you responded yes to the curriculum question).

    This is available for all proficiencies. It's just much harder to talk for hours in a new language as a beginner. It's usable but requires more effort.

    • drakonka  13 hours ago

      I see it now, thank you! This looks like what I was hoping for. I wonder if there's some way to communicate very clearly that you'll need to talk for around n minutes to get a structured curriculum prepared - and maybe even show a progress bar of some sort so the user can have an idea of when they're going to get to "the good stuff"?

      Another thing is that the trial period seems incongruent. To me the structured curriculum is what I really want to _try_. I want to see what the planned lessons are like, how guided they are, etc. But the trial runs out and tries to make me pay right after the unstructured more all-over-the-place feeling introductory conversation, and I'm not prepared to pay at that point since I feel like I haven't gotten to evaluate the main part of the product at all. I would suggest leaving the trial unlocked to maybe the first three structured lessons of the learning plan. Let the user really experience what they'll be paying for.

candiddevmike  1 day ago

Why wouldn't intermediate/advanced students just talk directly to ChatGPT? From what I see, I thought your value prop was for the beginners.

  • mariano54  1 day ago

    ISSEN is designed from the ground up for this use case.

    * curriculum, completely customizable, with grammar, roleplay, topics, speaking speech, transcript, dictionary, corrections, etc

    * prompting and AI models all chosen to be a better fit for multilingual, easy to understand, etc.

    * the tutor actively tries to teach you, it's not an assistant

    * integrated flashcards that go hand in hand with the speaking immersion