Parrot, a FREE app to help practice Bengali, Hindi, Mandarin, and Korean

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robtf9
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Joined: Fri Oct 08, 2021 7:28 am
Languages: English (N), Bengali (Beginner)

Parrot, a FREE app to help practice Bengali, Hindi, Mandarin, and Korean

Postby robtf9 » Fri Oct 08, 2021 7:34 am

Hi All,

I hope I'm in the right place, I've being working on my own web app to help me learn Bengali: https://parrot.to

You create an account, pick which language you want to learn, add phrases with your voice, and then the "Parrot" will create games to help you practice.

I'm planning to submit this as part of a masters application so interested in any feedback people have.

Thanks :)
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Gordafarin2
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Languages: English (N)
Current focus: Mandarin (A2), Italian (A2)
Maintaining: Persian (B2), Esperanto (B2), Spanish (rusty B1-2)
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17156
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Re: Parrot, a FREE app to help practice Bengali, Hindi, Mandarin, and Korean

Postby Gordafarin2 » Mon Oct 11, 2021 10:31 am

Neat app! When I read your post, I thought I would be listening to my own non-native pronunciation over and over, which put me off. But now I see it's using speech recognition and TTS. (I don't love TTS, but it's definitely better than listening to my own wonky tones!) I only tested Mandarin btw, as that's the only language of your list that I'm familiar with. I'm sure you could get more feedback from other people if you expanded your list of languages, but that's also probably a lot of extra work.

For the onboarding process, I would rather postpone the admin work of creating an account and setting a daily goal until I have seen what it is I'll actually be doing. How can I know how many phrases I want to practice a day, until I understand what that practice entails?

Why can I not leave the pronunciation field blank? If I know the characters 大,家,and 好 already, I don't need any help in pronouncing 大家好。 Auto-pinyin would be great though.

I would like a little more feedback when the microphone is recording - maybe some sound waves of what it is capturing? The record button is pulsing, but I'm never quite sure if it is receiving what I say. Automatic start/stop is good feature when it works, but one time I went through my phrases and it marked them all wrong in quick succession before I could say anything - maybe it was picking up on background noise. So I would prefer having start recording / stop recording / skip question buttons.

If I get a question wrong during the review stage (you call it "Game", but it's not really a game is it?) then it'd be good to play the correct pronunciation, so I know what I got wrong. Even better would be to mark where in the phrase I failed (ex: The phrase was dàjiā hǎo, but you said dàjià hǎo), but I don't know if that's technically feasible.

Is your masters in programming, design/UX, or language/pedagogy? Knowing that will help me to focus my feedback :D It's a promising concept! I have been known to switch my Google Assistant into Chinese to see if it can understand me, which is a similar idea haha.
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Persian... 10 novels: 4 / 10

Mandarin...
4000 words: 4000 / 4000 / 2000 characters: 1640 / 2000

she/her


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