If you could build any app for language learning, what would you build?

[Voytek]

An ebook reader with the option allowing you to hear how to pronpounce a word that you`re looking up and with the option sending the word to Anki (with the sound, of course). It would be nice if it have the option of transfering a picked text into sound too.

[arthaey]

But the most important part is the counting. I want the app to adapt my plan, according to my progress. Noone has problem to divide a number of chapters by a number of days. But it's the dynamics, that makes it difficult. The recounting, planning whether I can take a day off or not, or how much should I intensify my work.

You might find PaceMaker useful. It was originally meant for tracking one's progress for NaNoWriMo, but it's since expanded to be much more broadly useful for goal-tracking and dynamic goals based on currently progress vs deadline.

[Cavesa]

But the most important part is the counting. I want the app to adapt my plan, according to my progress. Noone has problem to divide a number of chapters by a number of days. But it's the dynamics, that makes it difficult. The recounting, planning whether I can take a day off or not, or how much should I intensify my work.

You might find PaceMaker useful. It was originally meant for tracking one's progress for NaNoWriMo, but it's since expanded to be much more broadly useful for goal-tracking and dynamic goals based on currently progress vs deadline.

THANK YOU!!!!
THANK YOU!!!!
THANK YOU!!!!
It looks awesome. Exactly as I imagined it!
If you were here, I'd hug you!

And thanks for telling me on time. I have started my first two plans to test it all out, and am likely to buy the premium membership for the year for the much lower price (that lasts only till the last January).

And more importantly, it is on time in regards to my studies.

[Querneus]

there was a post here, but it's gone now

(it was a reply to Cavesa, omitting her last post right above)

[reineke]

Backstory

Every year I try to take some time out to work on a personal programming project either in Ruby/Rails (for apps) or Python (for data science/analytics) to keep my skills somewhat fresh. I'd say I'm probably a B1 when it comes to Ruby and an A2 at Python Last year I built a very lightweight private Pinterest clone to save sites and articles I want to return to later without emailing them to myself (Ruby), and the year before I built a big natural language processor for UN Security Council resolutions (Python) and a travel prep/packing app that never went live (Ruby). I haven't built anything significant this year, so I was thinking of merging passion with practicality and building an app that would be of some use to language learners.

With that said...

I'm looking for ideas! If you had unlimited resources/skills, what app(s) would you build for yourself? What features would you like to have? A general notion of what I'd like to build is slowly starting to take shape, but I'd love for it to be useful to others.

Limitations

- It would have to be desktop/browser-based, as the only thing I can build in iOS thus far is an app that calculates your cat's age in human years (#practical )
- There is, as of yet, no Ruby gem ( = plugin) to magically ingest languages. Alas.

If you could solve this problem, you would create a great and useful app.

HPVT

"At the recent Acoustics 2008 meeting, I heard a presentation that reminded me of a mystery that I've been wondering about for nearly two decades. The paper presented was Maria Uther et al., "Training of English vowel perception by Finnish speakers to focus on spectral rather than durational cues", JASA 123(5):3566, 2008. And the mystery is why HVPT — a simple, quick, and inexpensive technique for helping adults to learn the sounds of new languages — is not widely used.

Actually, the initialism HVPT (for "High Variability Phonetic Training") is new, or at least new to me. But the ideas behind this type of training, and the basic evidence that it works, have been around for a while.

The starting point is the fact that speakers of a given language sometimes have a terrible time with certain "sounds" — certain phonological categories or distinctions — in another language. And I'm not talking about production problems, like the difficulty of learning to roll an [r], but about perceptual problems, the problem of learning to hear certain sound categories as distinct from others. (There's usually an associated production problem as well)

About 15 years ago, a student at Penn looked into this problem for a class project, with results that surprised me. In a forced-choice classification task involving English minimal pairs like "sick" vs. "seek", several fluent speakers of English whose native language was Spanish or Japanese performed essentially at chance levels. Her subjects included some people who had been living in the U.S. and interacting daily in English for a decade or more.

If someone has good communications skills in English, maybe surprising deficits in some aspects of English phonetic perception don't matter. On the other hand, if there were an easy way to fix the problem, it couldn't hurt. And based on my own experiences with other languages, I think that it ought to help, especially in the earlier stages of language learning, when you don't have a lot of lexical redundancy to work with.

The first and most striking example of this that I encountered personally was as an undergraduate, in a field methods course where we worked on Javanese. The Javanese consonant distinction that is written in romanization as p/b, t/d, c/j, k/g — and is cognate to a voicing distinction in related languages — is realized phonetically without any difference in voicing. The distinction is sometimes described as "light" vs. "heavy", where the "heavy" consonants (written b, d, j, g in romanization) apparently have a widened pharynx caused by advancing the root of the tongue, and sometimes a murmured or slightly breathy voice quality.

After a semester of trying, I still couldn't reliably transcribe this aspect of the language, though of course once I learned a word, I could remember how to "spell" it. Thus after we'd recorded, transcribed and analyzed a folktale about the mouse deer, "kancil", I knew that the trickster was Kancil and not Kanjil or Gancil or Ganjil. But categorizing the stop consonants in a new word as "heavy" or "light" remained a struggle.

Everyone else in the class, including the instructor, had the same problem. Curiously, we could discriminate the categories perfectly well: if we heard a minimal pair, say /ba/ vs. /pa/ in either order, it was easy to tell which was heavy and which was light. The problem was that when we heard just one, we couldn't identify the category at all accurately.

OK, enter HVPT. This is a simple method for teaching people to distinguish foreign-language sounds that they find difficult. The basic idea is incredibly straightforward: lots of practice in forced-choice identification of minimal pairs, with immediate feedback, using recordings from multiple speakers.

Suppose we're teaching English /i/ vs. /ɪ/. Then on each trial, the subject sees a minimal pair — say mitt vs. meet — and hears a recorded voice saying one of the two words. The subject makes a choice, and immediately learns whether the choice was right or wrong.

(Of course, you can eliminate the written-language aspect by giving the categories descriptive names, like "lax i" vs. "tense i", or just arbitrary names, like "type 1" and "type 2".

What psycholinguists showed, more than 15 years ago, was that this simple method only works if the stimuli are varied enough. If you test repeatedly on a single example, subjects won't be able to generalize to other examples. If you use just one speaker, then subjects won't be able to generalize to the productions of others. But experience with a few different repetitions of a few dozen example types by each of a half a dozen or so varied speakers seems to be enough to allow generalization to new examples and new speakers.

Over the past decade and a half, continuing research shows that considerable improvement generally comes quickly (e.g. from chance responses to 70-80% correct, after 10 half-hour sessions spread over two weeks), lasts a long time (with good retention six months or a year later), and also creates improvements in production. And these days, it would be trivial to make this technique available as a web application, so that students could do their practice sessions whenever and wherever.

But as far as I know, there are no language courses where HVPT is in routine (or even experimental) use. I don't believe that this is because it's been tried and found wanting — as far as I know, no one has any evidence either way about what impact HVPT has on overall language learning.

So I'm puzzled. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I've been asking language-teaching professionals about this since 1992 or so, when I first heard about the technique. And I've never run accross one who's heard of the idea.

Maybe in the end HVPT doesn't make enough impact on overall language-learning progress to be worth doing. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money the other way.

There are many other obvious questions to ask, some of which have no doubt been answered in research that I don't know about. One that comes to mind is the role of variation due to discourse and sentence context, as opposed to variation due to phonological context and speaker differences. But for me, the biggest question is a sociological one: why the big disconnect between research and practice?"

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=328

[Cainntear]

If you could solve this problem, you would create a great and useful app.

HPVT

The difficulty with HVPT isn't the software -- that's trivially easy. The problem is getting a big enough collection of recordings. It's a very, very expensive way of dealing with what looks on the surface like a very small number of words. If a national broadcaster did it for their language, that might work, but they'd still need a lot of money to go through their archives to harvest the material.

[reineke]

HPVT - reader comments

"Judith Meyer said,
July 29, 2010 @ 6:31 am

I came across an excellent program for French many years back, which used this idea. They made distinguishing pairs not just for inner-French problems such as the various nasals, but also for foreign sounds vs. French sounds. I recently looked for this program again but couldn't find it anymore. There was a shareware or demo for it available. Anyway, I'm tempted to create something similar for German..."

Sounds like a nice, unique group project.

[DCDC]

there was a post here. it's gone now.