Need feedback on a free website for learning Spanish

[QuemTemBocaVaiaRoma]

Posted with a permission from administration.

Hi,

I'm developing a free website that allows one to improve Spanish language skills by watching music videos. The idea is pretty similar to Yabla and FluentU: while watching the video on the website you are going to see two subtitle tracks, one with English translation and one with original Spanish lyrics. Clicking on any word within the Spanish track will reveal the exact translation of said word in context (e.g. whether "para" means "for" or "stop").

Please take a look at the link below and let me know what you think. I'd really appreciate suggestions on how to make this better.

http://listo.live

[Gordafarin2]

Are you looking for feedback on just the idea, or the whole website itself? Several things look unfinished (no way to get back to the homepage once you've clicked on a video, some things misaligned) so I'm going to assume the design aspect is a work in progress and focus on the functionality.

Personally, I would like the Spanish text to be bigger than the English, since that's what I want to be focusing on - following the Spanish, and just referring to the English when I need help understanding.

Options to hide one or both of the subtitles would be handy, too - If I wanted to listen through the song once to see how much I can understand without help, then turn on the Spanish to check if I heard right, then turn on the English to check if I understood right. It's not a "need" but it's a "nice to have".

Maybe a way to view the full vocabulary list, in a similar way to the list of lyrics you get clicking the "sentences" button? I noticed that there are some words that are parsed as full phrases (I clicked 'cuenta' and it popped up 'darse cuenta') which is great, and I'd love it to list out those idiomatic phrases somewhere for me.

One last thing, if there is going to be a large number of videos, I would love to see some tagging/sorting options - for genre of music, maybe difficulty level, and the nationality of the singer since Spanish has so many different accents and dialects.

I look forward to seeing how it progresses! Thanks for sharing.

[QuemTemBocaVaiaRoma]

Are you looking for feedback on just the idea, or the whole website itself? Several things look unfinished (no way to get back to the homepage once you've clicked on a video, some things misaligned) so I'm going to assume the design aspect is a work in progress and focus on the functionality.

Personally, I would like the Spanish text to be bigger than the English, since that's what I want to be focusing on - following the Spanish, and just referring to the English when I need help understanding.

Options to hide one or both of the subtitles would be handy, too - If I wanted to listen through the song once to see how much I can understand without help, then turn on the Spanish to check if I heard right, then turn on the English to check if I understood right. It's not a "need" but it's a "nice to have".

Maybe a way to view the full vocabulary list, in a similar way to the list of lyrics you get clicking the "sentences" button? I noticed that there are some words that are parsed as full phrases (I clicked 'cuenta' and it popped up 'darse cuenta') which is great, and I'd love it to list out those idiomatic phrases somewhere for me.

One last thing, if there is going to be a large number of videos, I would love to see some tagging/sorting options - for genre of music, maybe difficulty level, and the nationality of the singer since Spanish has so many different accents and dialects.

I look forward to seeing how it progresses! Thanks for sharing.

Yes, having a full vocabulary list is definitely a nice idea. The same goes for toggling the subtitles. I also plan to implement a feature that would allow you to look up a certain word and find all the places where the word occurs.

As for the misalignment, where does it occur? Can you post a screenshot?

[Gordafarin2]

Sure -- in the list of songs, the titles and buttons are right up against the image with no padding:

lyricswebsite.PNG

[Cainntear]

Sure -- in the list of songs, the titles and buttons are right up against the image with no padding:

I'm getting similar issues.

In my case it's because I have a high resolution laptop screen, so everything's tiny by default, and I normally browse at 150% zoom to keep things big enough to read. I don't know if its your stylesheet or the www-widget.js framework, but it seems to calculate positions based on the screen size in pixels and the initial shape of the screen. Any zooming or resizing of the browser leads to the text moving relative to the images -- sometimes drifting far off to the left, sometimes moving right and overlapping the image.

I would personally use a row-aligned CSS flexbox for each row (video) of the site -- then the position of the text will be fixed relative to the thumbnail image.

[Cainntear]

Oh, and why do I have to click the "watch" button? Why can't I just click on the thumbnail or the title?

[Cainntear]

The window was still open in a background tab. It looks like the text elements are positioned as a fixed percentage of window width.

[QuemTemBocaVaiaRoma]

The window was still open in a background tab. It looks like the text elements are positioned as a fixed percentage of window width.

I'm using Bootstrap column model for the layout, I suppose I haven't done everything right because generally Bootstrap works pretty nicely on different screen sizes

[mentecuerpo]

I like it, I love youtube songs to learn the language, but then I need to have two windows, one with the video and another with the lyrics.

It solves the problem; you get lyrics with the translation.

I like the click on the Spanish word, and you get the translation (just like a kindle) and the text to speech feature that helps clarifying the singing phrase.

Yabla has some of that, but the music videos are old, and they don't have a good selection of songs.

I would put the Spanish lyrics on the top.

And just like Yabla, a feature that will let you hide the Lyrics or the translation by the user.

It would be nice to have a full transcription of the songs with the lyrics for download.

Symplicity will win, in my opinion.

Songs are a great way to learn.

I think it is an idea worth developing.

I also have an online language course that I got via my public library, it is called "Pronunciator" It has a feature of a few music audio files that I liked with the Lyrics. If you are in the USA, I think you can get the pronunciator via your public library. You can check it and see if they are doing something right. The problem is that the pronunciation has very few songs, less than ten per language course.

Readlang has a few videos with lyrics.

[QuemTemBocaVaiaRoma]

I like it, I love youtube songs to learn the language, but then I need to have two windows, one with the video and another with the lyrics.

It solves the problem; you get lyrics with the translation.

I like the click on the Spanish word, and you get the translation (just like a kindle) and the text to speech feature that helps clarifying the singing phrase.

Yabla has some of that, but the music videos are old, and they don't have a good selection of songs.

I would put the Spanish lyrics on the top.

And just like Yabla, a feature that will let you hide the Lyrics or the translation by the user.

It would be nice to have a full transcription of the songs with the lyrics for download.

Symplicity will win, in my opinion.

Songs are a great way to learn.

I think it is an idea worth developing.

I also have an online language course that I got via my public library, it is called "Pronunciator" It has a feature of a few music audio files that I liked with the Lyrics. If you are in the USA, I think you can get the pronunciator via your public library. You can check it and see if they are doing something right. The problem is that the pronunciation has very few songs, less than ten per language course.

Readlang has a few videos with lyrics.

Glad you liked it.