I am running L-Lingo ( https://l-lingo.com ) - a language learning app that includes a spaced repetition system in addition to its lesson based content.
Here is what I learned in the last 10 years in this field. I hope you will find this valuable when developing SoYouLearn.
- Language Content vs Features:
We as developers like to focus our time and energy on implementing great flashcard features but often the language content itself is a second thought. Odten we do not curate the content ourself and let users do it or we prefer to use copyright free content.
From our experience, the quality of the content is extremely important. Your students will quickly become frustrated if they see errors in the language content and then think that your whole product is of low quality -even if you have a great technical implementation! So make sure you have high quality content!
We have invested heavily in the content of our app and even wrote Grammar notes for nearly 20 languages -not because WE wanted to do it (we probably would have been much happier coding ;) but because OUR USERS where asking for this -repeatedly.
Also from our experience, students are more willing to pay for high quality content (e.g. Top 10000 Spanish Flashcards) then for advanced features. This is true especially for Flashcards because ANKI is well known, working very well and free. So why pay except for great content?
- Focus on Languages OR other Areas:
Yes in principle, spaced repetition works for all kinds of contents (languages obviously but also if you learn geography, anatomy, heck even for learning coding you can use flashcards). However once you want to built a powerful and more importantly user friendly system, there are important differences. E.g. when you learn languages like Chinese you need to provide a field for Pinyin, you should have audio associated and maybe also an example sentence. So what I want to say is if you focus your system on ONLY language learning you can make your UI much more user friendly.
I think you might come into troubles if some users use your product for language learning and others for learning other things as then your users will have different priorities on what features they need and what you should implement.
- Include Motivational Aspects within your App:
Learning something completely new is tough, Language Learning is even much tougher! A very high percentage of language learning app users give up very quickly. It took us many years here at L-Lingo to realize this and we are now spending approx. 50% of our time and effort to keep our users motivated to follow through on their language learning.
We do this in many different aspects, gamification of the language learning, learning reminders, giving our students tips on effective language learning etc.
Keep in mind: Even the best flashcards system does not work if your students are not motivated to use it regularly!
- Beta testers and early adopters
I think one of the key successes when we launched L-Lingo was to actively looking for a small but very engaged group of early users. And we focused on a small niche (Thai Language Learners!). I think this helped us to create value for this group early on, to understand what was really important (e.g. the quality of the content). So you made the first right step with this hackernews post but now try and find real permanent users that you can engage with regularly.
Thats all for now. Feel free to ask questions if you have!
I have worked with various cross platform tools for a few years now and in the end all of them came to the same conclusion:
Its faster and easier to get a prototype or very simple (non-polished) app working that does not rely on specific api's to the mobile too much.
So basically you will manage to get 80% done more quickly with the cross platform tool.
However the last 20% are the very tricky part. There might be some strange bugs appearing from the cross platform tool that are hard to solve or just simply wanting to achieve a very polished app with smooth transition and the latest 'native' UI components and UI paradigms (e.g. Android Lollipop).
I also had a few major bugs coming from the interface between the native SDK and the cross platform framework. One example was that suddenly the phone fonts for some Asian languages were not displayed anymore. These problems often happened when there were some SDK changes on Android or iOS and the cross platform framework had to catch up with these changes.
Compared to native developments its also way harder to find good libraries and solve bugs (e.g. via stack overflow) because there are just way less people developing with these cross platform tools.
Since last year I stopped all cross platform developments and are now developing for iOS and Android natively and I realised that I am actually developing IN SUM faster natively then before with the cross platform tools. Main reason for this is that I have a huge focus on polished and high performing UI's and in the past I wasted a huge amount of hours just to fight the weaknesses of the cross platform tools.
So my recommendation for all who want to develop polished and professional iOS and Android Apps is now to go the native route from the beginning. Its better to try and save time by shifting some code to the server side (if you have a mobile app that extends a web app) and by developing a great abstract documentation/specification that can then be quickly implemented in the respective native language.
Actually this is not really new. Since 2003 Businesses outside the EU that sell to private (not business) customers in the EU need to pay VAT to an EU member country.
This is called VAT on e-Services.
Most App Stores (except Google Play) took care of this already but if you did direct sales (e.g. via Paypal, direct payments etc) you need to calculate the tax every quarter and pay it to a member state (which will then distribute it to the other states so that you need to do only one payment).
The main new thing now is that app stores who had a subsidiary in Luxembourg can no longer funnel it through the lowest VAT country but need to split it up according to the customer country.
Yes and this is what is the most unsettling part, the TLDR for small businesses is if you don't sell through a marketplace your sod out of luck and now regarding the VAT threshold and need to burden the cost of becoming VAT registered
I made good progress with a webapp called VocLab (http://www.voclab.com/).
Once you studied for a while you can track your learning progress with some detailed statistics and then tweak your forgetting curve to make sure the words are presented at the right time.
We have two boys who are tri-lingual (thai, german, english). The essential thing is that the kid makes the association:
one person = one language
If you speak both English and Chinese to your son, he might be later confused on what words are from which language.
I would recommend you only speak Chinese to him. For our kids, English is now their strongest language but it was only taught by their 'environment' i.e. kindergarten / school and they started with English only at age 2-3. Now they talk English with each other (before they went through a period in which they talked German or Thai with each other). So you should not underestimate the 'environment language'.
Also, you might consider having some other relatives speaking certain specific languages with your son (e.g. grandparents). This could reinforce their language skills.
Personally, I do not believe that learning languages from TV is effective. Learning languages is about relationships and interaction. I think the 1 hr per day would be better spend on interacting with your son in the respective language, e.g. by playing memory game etc.
Regarding late development of speaking. We did not experience this with our kids. But they might be a bit delayed when learning to read and write because of different phonetic rules of the respective languages.
> The essential thing is "one person = one language"
I was told this by many people but I am not sure why they say this.
My wife and I always spoke a mixture (German/French) together so of course did so also with our kid (plus English/Spanish outside the house). He had no problem, and in school or was quite orthodox in regards to which language to speak with which person. But at home or with relatives and polyglot friends he would switch back and forth. His classmates seemed to be the same.
I have seen my mother, in her 70s, switch mid sentence when arguing with her brother. Then turn and speak to my father in English.
Artificial neural networks do both supervised and unsupervised learning. While this is a very rough generalization, unsupervised learning is good for building models and encodings of data, while supervised learning is good for minimizing the error rate when answering questions about data. The state of the art for training neural networks is to "initialize" the network with unsupervised learning, then "tune" it with supervised learning.
To me, a child learning from listening to the TV is like a form unsupervised learning. It probably helps them build an internal representation of language structure, but doesn't teach them much if anything about proper use of language. If I had to guess, I'd say it is probably mildly helpful when the child is very young (especially if the alternative is silence), but it probably stops providing any value fairly quickly (by about a year of age for the typical child would be my very uneducated guess). At this point, I'm guessing improvements in language facilities probably require focused interaction (supervised learning).
Thank you for your input. The one person = one language is echoed by eande and wooyi too, so maybe I'll try that. My mom takes care of him half of the week in the day time and speaks Chinese to him, so that's why I was trying to speak some English to him since he doesn't get much exposure to English (no daycare yet). I may be exaggerating a bit on the 40% though, it's probably less than that, mostly just on some vocabulary that doesn't come out naturally in Chinese for me.
Playing memory game is a good idea, we haven't done too much of that.
Majority of Finnish children learns English from TV and knows it quote well before starting school. They learns all from TV, because in Finland they do not voice-over dub[0] TV shows (except children shows), only add subtitles.
When I was child we had re-transmitted children German tv shows, I could speak German a bit without actually learning it for other sources.
Disclaimer: I'm not from Finland, but had discussion with one of the teacher in there.
Here is what I learned in the last 10 years in this field. I hope you will find this valuable when developing SoYouLearn.
- Language Content vs Features: We as developers like to focus our time and energy on implementing great flashcard features but often the language content itself is a second thought. Odten we do not curate the content ourself and let users do it or we prefer to use copyright free content. From our experience, the quality of the content is extremely important. Your students will quickly become frustrated if they see errors in the language content and then think that your whole product is of low quality -even if you have a great technical implementation! So make sure you have high quality content!
We have invested heavily in the content of our app and even wrote Grammar notes for nearly 20 languages -not because WE wanted to do it (we probably would have been much happier coding ;) but because OUR USERS where asking for this -repeatedly.
Also from our experience, students are more willing to pay for high quality content (e.g. Top 10000 Spanish Flashcards) then for advanced features. This is true especially for Flashcards because ANKI is well known, working very well and free. So why pay except for great content?
- Focus on Languages OR other Areas: Yes in principle, spaced repetition works for all kinds of contents (languages obviously but also if you learn geography, anatomy, heck even for learning coding you can use flashcards). However once you want to built a powerful and more importantly user friendly system, there are important differences. E.g. when you learn languages like Chinese you need to provide a field for Pinyin, you should have audio associated and maybe also an example sentence. So what I want to say is if you focus your system on ONLY language learning you can make your UI much more user friendly.
I think you might come into troubles if some users use your product for language learning and others for learning other things as then your users will have different priorities on what features they need and what you should implement.
- Include Motivational Aspects within your App: Learning something completely new is tough, Language Learning is even much tougher! A very high percentage of language learning app users give up very quickly. It took us many years here at L-Lingo to realize this and we are now spending approx. 50% of our time and effort to keep our users motivated to follow through on their language learning.
We do this in many different aspects, gamification of the language learning, learning reminders, giving our students tips on effective language learning etc.
Keep in mind: Even the best flashcards system does not work if your students are not motivated to use it regularly!
- Beta testers and early adopters I think one of the key successes when we launched L-Lingo was to actively looking for a small but very engaged group of early users. And we focused on a small niche (Thai Language Learners!). I think this helped us to create value for this group early on, to understand what was really important (e.g. the quality of the content). So you made the first right step with this hackernews post but now try and find real permanent users that you can engage with regularly.
Thats all for now. Feel free to ask questions if you have!