The Fluent Forever App

General discussion about learning languages
David1917
Blue Belt
Posts: 596
Joined: Mon Nov 06, 2017 2:36 am
Location: USA
Languages: English (N)
Professional Level: Russian, Spanish
x 1564

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby David1917 » Tue Nov 07, 2017 9:35 pm

ASEAN wrote:Gabriel Wyner is going after market share. Most people want phone apps so they can "play" at learning a language. They are very honest that they don't want to put any actual time or effort into learning.


This is my reading as well. Fluent Forever is a great book, and as has been pointed out the "busy work" of creating your own Anki cards is part of the process. But, when you're successful as a "language guy" but most people just want something spoon-fed and "fun" - this is where you go.
2 x

User avatar
MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2113
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
x 4822

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Nov 09, 2017 6:55 pm

I came to this thread looking for the name of Wyner's app. Because his book demonstrates a nifty way to remember the gender of German nouns, I went to his site to buy his Anki deck for German. The site advertises so many products that it bewildered me and I left. :roll: Still looking. ;)
0 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

Andy E
Yellow Belt
Posts: 91
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 8:41 am
Languages: *
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8001
x 149

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Andy E » Fri Nov 10, 2017 7:13 am

0 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3467
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8656
Contact:

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Cainntear » Fri Nov 10, 2017 8:38 am

Oh dear. Just looked at the campaign page properly, and noticed that under the part discussing "a curated, proofread list of sentences that other users have submitted" (my emphasis)

Screenshot on Kickstarter wrote:Dos botellas de vino blanco y una botella de Burdeos.
Two litres of white wine and some Bordeaux.

El búho de Harry Potter es blanco.
The owl of Harry Potter is white.

Neither of those would get past me as a curator. The second is certainly less agregious, but the correct translation would unarguably be "Harry Potter's owl". The first is ridiculous -- it's not just a liberal translation, it's a mistranslation. A bottle of wine is 750ml, so two bottles of white is 1.5 litres, not 2; and the change of reference for the Bordeaux from a bottle to "some" is just too distant to be useful.

Honestly, if I'm paying for curated content, I'm not expecting that sort of amateur error.

Speaking of subscriptions, there's no clear statement of the pricing, but looking at the $10/$5 discount mentioned in the $50 rewards tier, and the claimed 16.5% discount, it would appear he's planning to have it for $60 (premium) and $30 (basic). There's no mention as to whether that's a monthly or annual rate, and I want to think "no way is he trying to sell it for $720/$360 per year", but it actually looks like he is... The $50 tier is one month premium or two months basic -- it a $10 discount on $60 or two $5 discounts on $30 + $30.

Wow.

At $720 per year, I seriously do not want to see ungrammatical phrases like "the owl of Harry Potter" or semantically incorrect translations appearing on my screen.

Edit -- I stopped reading too soon and got the prices wrong. See below.

Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez.
Last edited by Cainntear on Fri Nov 10, 2017 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
1 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3467
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8656
Contact:

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Cainntear » Fri Nov 10, 2017 8:39 am

Note that one year of the *basic* is priced on a par with a CD copy of Rosetta Stone or Fluenz, which are bloody expensive packages to start off with. Premium is twice that.
Last edited by Cainntear on Sun Nov 12, 2017 11:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
0 x

User avatar
smallwhite
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2386
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:55 am
Location: Hong Kong
Languages: Native: Cantonese;
Good: English, French, Spanish, Italian;
Mediocre: Mandarin, German, Swedish, Dutch.
.
x 4876

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby smallwhite » Fri Nov 10, 2017 10:00 am

What do you call a virtual course that doesn't exist yet? A virtual virtual course? A yet virtual course?
0 x
Dialang or it didn't happen.

User avatar
Adrianslont
Blue Belt
Posts: 827
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 10:39 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), Learning Indonesian and French
x 1936

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Adrianslont » Fri Nov 10, 2017 10:45 am

smallwhite wrote:What do you call a virtual course that doesn't exist yet? A virtual virtual course? A yet virtual course?

Vapourware! It’s a real word!
2 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3467
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8656
Contact:

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Cainntear » Fri Nov 10, 2017 1:32 pm

Adrianslont wrote:
smallwhite wrote:What do you call a virtual course that doesn't exist yet? A virtual virtual course? A yet virtual course?

Vapourware! It’s a real word!

Vapourware implies that you don't expect to ever see it. In thisinstance, I would be very surprised if nothing appeared. His proposal is for an SRS app which integrates with Google Images and their own database -- technically, it's not a massive job.... in fact, I'd say it's actually pretty trivial.

...trivial to the point that "vapourware" isn't actually that unreasonable (he says, completely contradicting what he originally intended to say). He's taken the time or spent the money to get a bunch of mockups of an app made, when he could have actually got a real, working prototype done. Heck, if he's been planning this since 2012, why didn't he buy a book on app development back then so that he could just do it himself?

But with over $600 000 at his disposal, it would be absolutely crazy if he was incapable of getting a basic app out there -- and remember, he's been very vague about the amount of material available in the app, so he doesn't even need to record many sentences at all for each pair.

The only thing that might trip him up is the non-Latin languages that are now included via "stretch goals". Modern development tools should handle these OK (Android and iOS both support them as standard, after all) but look at the number of apps that were never able to go beyond Latin-script languages due to minor technical hiccups.

So I'm kind of pulled both ways on describing it as "vapourware" (en_US: vaporware).
No, no I'm not. He uses mock-ups and says he wants to build an app, but talks about image search (the hardest part of the whole thing, so the one thing he's pretty much guaranteed not to have done) as though they have it.

So yes, vapourware.
2 x

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Nov 10, 2017 3:56 pm

I’m getting bombarded with his ads everywhere, on my Facebook, on my Instagram etc every single day. What amuses me is the fact that I’d likely not use the app even if it were free as I simply have an abundance of resources at hand because my target languages are more mainstream. Cortina, Glossika, Linguaphone, Assimil, FSI etc. Add free tv shows, free audiobooks, free ebooks, free Anki, Memrise etc and I simply cant fathom why I’d pay such an extravagant price to subscribe to the app.


Is it just me or have subscription prices jumped rather dramatically in just a few months? Here was I, a few months ago, weighing the merits of a Spotify subscription vs a LingQ subscription ($10/month) and now I’m being asked to consider paying $30/60 a month for Speechling, Glossika, Fluent Forever etc

You heard it here first, soon we’ll creep towards that $100/month mark for truly ‘premium learning’.
2 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3467
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8656
Contact:

Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Cainntear » Fri Nov 10, 2017 7:08 pm

Atinkoriko wrote:Is it just me or have subscription prices jumped rather dramatically in just a few months? Here was I, a few months ago, weighing the merits of a Spotify subscription vs a LingQ subscription ($10/month) and now I’m being asked to consider paying $30/60 a month for Speechling, Glossika, Fluent Forever etc

Sorry -- my mistake. There is pricing on the page, just miles down, and it turns out $10 and $5 are the discounted prices, not the discount -- regular prices will be $12 and $6 a month. That's a bit of an odd pricing structure, to be honest... $6 is a very weird number and feels a lot higher than $5 than it really is, which could put people off. I strongly suspect the prices will change later, and that there will be a yearly payment option at a much rounder number... but that rounder number is likely to end up being very similar to the discounted price ($120 sounds sensible for a year, which is the same as 12*$10), so I hope the discount would also apply to that.

But my god this is mindbogglingly complex. I've tried to write this message about 3 times and keep getting in a knot. (Note that any prices mentioned below are the full price, not the Kickstarter/Indiegogo discount prices.)

The app is free. But using the free subscription, you can't add your own sentences to your own app. You can add sentences to the community database, but you can't actually view other peoples sentences. The free app allows you to review any sentences you have in the app at no charge, but you can't put any extra on. Yay.

It appears that if you want to add sentences to your app, you have several options:
1. Buy a $25 sentence pack from FF.
2. ]Type your own sentences into an app on your own phone, after paying $6 or $12 a month for the privilege. The justification for this is the cost of the image search; at $6 you are limited to 300 image searches a month (10 per day)
3. Get the sentences from the community database... again, after paying for the privilege. At the $6 tier you get 30 per month -- you have to pay $12 a month for unlimited access.
So essentially, your subscription is paying for the right produce your own materials and to get materials that other users have made for free. Ouch.

Note also that the pronunciation trainer that is allegedly integral to the system is also an additional purchase at $12 (same as currently on the FF website), or you can buy a pronunciation+sentences bundle for $30.

So... wow. If you want to use it for basic SRS, you've got to pay $6 a month. Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez. I haven't found clear mention of how many sentences are included in a sentence pack. The community database is of dubious value at the best of times (how good is the curation really going to be if they couldn't adequately "curate" two sentences for the demo?) and initially it's going to be pretty empty -- how long will it take to build critical mass... if it ever does at all?

The more I look at it, the less appealling it gets.

But wait, there's more!!!

Crowdfunding campaign wrote:Initially, there were some legal concerns about our particular use of image search in flashcards, but we've already consulted with lawyers and it appears that providing URLs of images and caching those results locally on mobile devices is considered a form of Fair Use for copyrighted imagery. We've already programmed a Proof of Concept for our image search engine and so the technological hurdles have already been overcome.

Appears... right. I'd be very concerned about this, because if image search is one of the few things users are paying for, what the hell is the product...? Deliberately directing users to someone's site to download an image specifically for use not relating to the website isn't clearly and specifically illegal, but there's a whole host of side-channels to make this messy, like computer misuse legislation. The question of whether it's "unauthorised access" to download an image from a site without credit is one that could go either way, and I wouldn't like to be the test case.

And another thing!
If they get to $850 000, they'll generously add in the ability to create community database sentences in whatever the hell language you like, even if FF don't offer any products in it, and I presume they will generously allow people to pay them $6/$12 a month for the privilege of accessing the free labour of their users for languages FF haven't produced a single sentence or sound file for! Their magnanimity astounds.

The whole community idea is worryingly similar in shape to a pyramid scheme -- people who've paid for their lifelong discount will feel invested and will advocate for the platform, as without new blood, the supply of new sentences will be limited. And as long as the supply of sentences is limited, everyone who is paying for it will be incentivised to try to drag more people in to create sentences.

But at the end of the day, what I really can't get my head round is the idea that you have to pay $6 a month just to type your own sentences in. That is crassly exploitative.
4 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: wynnsam and 2 guests