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Designing a language learning app

  Tags: Software
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
Akalabeth
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5454 days ago

83 posts - 112 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese

 
 Message 1 of 4
17 December 2011 at 8:19pm | IP Logged 
So I'm designing a language learning program somewhat similar to Anki, and am curious
if anyone has any ideas re: design issues. Long story short, I just got an iTouch, and
found the MindSnacks French app, which I really like (in particular the Fish Bowl
game). There are some downsides to it (you can't use custom words for one), so I'm
trying to make a similar desktop version of it.

The basic idea is you would get given a word in English (or maybe you're target
language), and then have to choose the translation by multiple choice. You have a
limited amount of time to answer, which decreases with each successful answer, and
after a certain number of failures the game ends.

The thing I really liked about the iTouch app was that there's no indication if you
have more reviews to do, or if you're reviewing early, which has made it seem less of a
grind than Anki. You just review as much as you like, and every once and a while it
presents new words. It seems to use SRS still, but in a weird way: it will present 20
new words, and you'll mostly only study those, but it will occasionally add old words
into the mix.

Minimally, what I want to make is something game-y to be a little less of a grind, to
accomplish fast recall and overlearning. Things that other people's ideas might help
with:

1) SRS algorithm. The Anki algorithm requires you to grade yourself every question, and
I'm not sure how well it works if you frequently review early, so I need to decide on
something different.

2) How the questions are presented. Is multiple choice the best way to do fast reviews?
If multiple choice, how many answers, and how are the other choices chosen?

3) How much time to give for each question. I'm thinking it could slowly
increase/decrease the amount of time you are given depending on how well you do, to try
and find your limits.

Any other ideas people have are welcome, but I'm not really a great programmer, so I'm
focusing on functionality over features. I'm intending to use this as a supplement for
Anki.
1 person has voted this message useful



Hampie
Diglot
Senior Member
Sweden
Joined 6594 days ago

625 posts - 1009 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English
Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin

 
 Message 2 of 4
17 December 2011 at 8:27pm | IP Logged 
Multiple choice is bad, it presents you the answer in a context that you normally would not have. You will ned get
to choose from a list of similar words when you encounter a word in reality, but only the word where it is.
1 person has voted this message useful



Akalabeth
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5454 days ago

83 posts - 112 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese

 
 Message 3 of 4
17 December 2011 at 8:44pm | IP Logged 
I think the main reason I like multiple choice is you can quiz yourself the fastest. I'm
curious what the effects of drilling yourself for near-instantaneous recall would be.

But yeah, multiple choice is a pretty non-natural way to study I think. In order to do
the timed reviews the program will need to be able to evaluate whether you got the
correct answer itself, and "Did you click on the correct button" is definitely the
simplest way to do it. You could also type in the answer, but then that has the issue
that there might be multiple valid answers, plus typos.
1 person has voted this message useful



Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 5946 days ago

4399 posts - 7687 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 4 of 4
17 December 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged 
The one hint I'd give you is that even a guess has a 25% chance of being right, so your algorithm shouldn't automatically tag every correct answer as good, and automatically push the review time back -- there needs to be some kind of averaging of results to measure that the item is known.


1 person has voted this message useful



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