As I wrote in my previous post about the PragueCrunch meetup, I was seriously impressed by what the people behind online language training service Learn10 are up to, so here’s an update with more information on that. Bear in mind that Learn10 is an entirely bootstrapped operation, founded by a British couple that moved to the Czech Republic a couple of years ago and are running the business from their home.
Learn10 allows you to quickly pick up the basic vocabulary of a language by teaching you 10 words a day, wherever you are. English speakers and learners can choose to learn frequently used vocabulary of a language for free using Learn10’s content (coming from one of 22 language pairs) or opt to input their own content (subscription-based). It comes with a widget you can share on any website or blog, as well as a variety of social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
When you click through to a word on the Learn10 widget, it fetches some basic information about the word in question but also searches Twitter’s real-time stream so you can get a feel of how the word is used in a certain language. This is a small feature but a very good idea: sometimes context is exactly how you remember to use words and phrases in a foreign language correctly. Furthermore, a built-in, Flash-based avatar can be used to speak words to you, so you don’t only learn how to write but also how to pronounce them (only for paying subscribers). You can even record the way you speak words and share it with the Seesmic community in one click, so native speakers are able to correct (or compliment) you virtually in real-time.
What else is there? Learn10 features a quick test you can kick off to check the state of your knowledge about basic vocabulary for a foreign language, and integrates with Google Translate so you don’t necessarily need to leave the site if you want to immerse yourself in another language a little deeper. The company also enables you to install a browser toolbar (powered by Conduit) and comes with a nifty screensaver, giving you the ability to keep the 10 words you’re supposed to be learning coming back to you multiple times a day in various ways (see Extras). Did we mention there’s also an API? Finally, paying users can consult their revision history and keep track of their progress.
Learn10 also built an iPhone web app, available free of charge, that incorporates some of the features of the web version and allows you to learn vocab on the go, with the ability to test yourself while you’re at it. In the video interview I did with co-founder Mike Robinson, he shares more about the app (sorry about the fact that the screen isn’t always as clear as I would have liked it to be):
nice idea, but that websites needs some serious work, and goofy avatars whose eyes follow your mouse around, I thought that died a much need death about 4 years ago?
not to mention, someone else will just do this for free
“someone else will just do this for free”
If they could do it by using the functionality of a site like hunch.com (using incremental questions to reach a specified end), it would be killer.
I also really like the idea of the site and will probably start using it with the app on my iPhone. Unfortunately, their site needs a redesign and some of their premium features seem like features I could find standard on similar sites
Like the simplicity of the whole thing.
yeah, that’s the idea.
i went to the learn10 site that was translated in French for me…. boy, this is the worst turn off to go to a language learning website and having the text automatically translated for you (by google i guess) and FULL of mistakes…
right, i’ll never go back, sorry.
We have been discussing whether this is a good idea or not and we will probably remove the auto translate feature very soon and have it so people need to choose it specifically. It is just the interface which is auto translated (via Google translate), the actual word lists are checked by translators. We figured that if you don’t speak English at all then a bad translation of the interface would be better than nothing to get you started using the widget, would appreciate any thoughts on this issue.
Sorry Mike, but in my opinion a bad translation is a no-go for a “learning a language” site. Either hire a translator or try to activate your users for the translation (e.g. by giving them free premium packages).
That does make sense for a site just starting out. At least it’s only the interface that is auto-translated, but I still think it’d be nice over time to come up with localized versions of the site for non-english speaking users.
@Ulf – I do see your point and ideally we would hire a translator to do it for us. However, we are self funded and the cash just isn’t there to do translations for all the languages we offer. We have had offers from the community to help with translations and it is something we should utilise more but for now we were concentrating on developing the widget.
@John Dyer – we really want to get localised versions of the site for all languages but it all costs money (unless we utilise the community as Ulf suggested), now if we were funded…
Thanks guys for your feedback, we are still in early stages so any suggestions are welcome
Cheers
Mike
Didn’t we have a word a day for English already? Did these guys just change it to 10 words and made it more ’social’?
We built Learn10 because we needed to improve our Czech (as part of the long tail of language learning – I had struggled to find enough interesting resources on the net) & 10 words a day is a little more ambitious than a single word…
I think it’s a good idea and a nice tool to improve and support the learning of another language
I leave for Nanjing in 45 days and speak no Chinese. So, that’s 450 words. I’ll give it a whirl.
(PS Just signed up. The widget is a bit clunky. And defaulted my language back to Spanish. I had to change the settings. I love the idea though, so I’ll give it a run.)
I had the issue of my language defaulting back to spanish as well after sign-up. Besides that, everything else is working pretty well.
I will check out this issue straight away. If you find any more problems email us at support[at]learn10[dot]com
I found a bug in the code which was causing this. It has been fixed now. Thanks for letting us know
very, very cool…simple, snippets are what people want
very interesting…I have my students use Twitter to communicate with native Italian speakers. This is a great additional tool specific to vocabulary building. Great for my next project with iPhones. Thanks
This is a great idea, signed up when reading this.
But (again): Please give me a chance to use a not totally screwed up automatically translated interface (german translation is really, really bad; layout is also affected by this). Another issue, don’t know if I get it how to use the widget correctly: The test is only about choosing the right multiple-choice answer? I don’t think this really helps me at all trying to learn another language, i got those 10 translated words somewhere in my short-time memory after reading them, but recognizing them when seeing them again is _totally_ different from having to find the translation for a given word yourself (even mixing up the translated words and having the student find the correct association would be more challenging than it is currently implemented)
Hi Andre,
The test is only about choosing the right multiple choice answer, and is against the clock.
Try it out. I find that after doing the quiz (and using the phased learning after 2,10,30 & 60 days) the next time I hear the word – for example when listening to the radio – I understand.
Of course, more in depth exercises, as you describe, will be useful for learners with more time. It would be great to add such activities to our content store in future.
We’re going to take down the auto translation of the site.
Many thanks!
Hi Andre,
Thanks for your feedback.
I have just removed the auto translate feature. It is still there if a user wants it (they would need to click the button at the top of the site).
With regard to the test, we actually find it really useful for learning as we usually repeat the test a few times to try and beat our previous scores
But of course we are aware that different people learn in different ways. This is one of the reasons we have developed the API which we are hoping other developers will use to create more compelling games for different learning styles. This is still in closed beta but if anyone is interested in working with us send an email to api[at]learn10[dot]com
Mike (@widgetyegg)
Thanks for your reply & action. I’ll try doing the test a few times each day and see if it’s helpful for me, too
Hi Robin,
Would you like to also do a review of online language service ChineseTeachers.com?
ChineseTeachers.com provides a flexible no-booking-needed & pay-per-second Chinese lessons with strictly assessed native Chinese teachers.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Nicolas
I have signed up, going abroad in 3months and a bit more of a grounding in Spanish would be handy…
I almost didn’t though, you should look at making the front page more simple. It is very confusing to a new user – there are too many options, and the facebook connect login doesn’t fit within the widget iframe on my screen so i couldn’t use it.
Nice. I always wonder if learning is something that can be automated or we would always need a real teacher?
Well there does seem to be a rise in the number of distant-learning, online courses. But I don’t learning, in and of itself, can be automated. Probably some aspects of learning can be e.g. the hard facts and knowledge of a subject, but learning and education is more than just giving students the facts. Attending school provides the social aspect of learning. Having real teachers provides flexibility for different types of learners and questions, which technology developers certainly cannot anticipate every single scenario and question that students can come up with. It’s also nice to have a real human touch, I would say. Hopefully teachers don’t go out of a job as a result of such technological developments.
I don’t think there is any danger for teachers to go out of stage. There are number of platforms who are developing features with teachers at the heart of interactions and discussions. It would be interesting to see if the balance for online learning would be real teachers plus automated learning rather than extremes of real teachers only and automated learning only.
A good idea, but the implementation still seems kind of rough.
In particular, I’m studying Japanese, and one really basic thing that japanese needs is the ability to display both kana and kanji (the chinese characters), whereas right now vocab only comes up in kana.
Integration with jim breen’s japanese dictionary, and jisho.org would be good.
Also, a “learn 10 kanji” mode would be a good complement.
I think that a lot of these features are obvious if you are studying the language in question… and maybe hard to design right if you are not, and don’t understand the needs of the particular language.
Hi Brendan,
We have Romaji on the widget which may help, if you look in the top right corner next to ‘English’ ‘japanese’ you will see a symbol with two arrows. If you click this it will change to Romaji We don’t have Kana yet but hope to support it in the future {we also need to make some of the features more obvious!).
Thanks
Mike
Gender of nouns would be nice. Learning french without them is a job half done.
Hi Leo,
We do have the genders for nouns, if you hover over the word it will popup more information about the word. You can also click on the magnifying glass next to each word to see more info (including usage on Twitter)
Mike
Hi everyone!
A similar concept, but in our opinion even more useful (for intermmediate or advanced students of the language) will be available shortly at
http://60words.com
It requires more work from the user side, but only for the better. Hey – language learning is hard…
How it works: you hear an interesting new word and you add it to your “personal dictionary” along with translation and that’s the hardest part. Then you practice when you feel like and the algorithm makes sure you get to see the word just enough times and in right time intervals. FUN!
Comes very handy when reading a book, going out with friends etc. Even better when you cannot remember the word you used to know.. this is a clear signal that you should enter it into the app and never forget it again.
A very minimalistic iPhone client will be available as well.
Leave your email at the site and get notified when we launch!
David
I forgot something important!
Congrats to Learn10 team as well! Looks promising! There has to be more options in this field. Let’s see how everything goes.
Thanks David, watch this space we do have a lot more to come
And good luck with your project.
eac – Your comment hits the mark – something Twitter is good for, other than Social Promotion – excellent, excellent.
I looked at the website and right straight away noticed a problem: synonyms and homonyms. It displayed together a random list (another problem) of 10 words in English and in Spanish. But Spanish is a language, not a code, so there should be a list of possibilities, not a word (or vice versa if you are trying to give a translation of Spanish words). Example: mi – my. Mi precedes the noun it modifies. If it comes after the noun, you should say mÃo, or mÃa. So mi casa, but casa mÃa. Another example: fat – grasa. The 1st word that came to mind was actually gordo/a. Grasa can also mean grease or lard if you are cooking.
I did like the examples, using the vocabulary in a twitter sentence. However, beware that internet users are notoriously poor at language skills – spelling, grammar and correct usage. Additionally, they use ‘net slang. I hope these tweets (see what I mean!) are being reviewed first.
I’d like to see lists that are not random. Better than 10 words would be 10 parts of the body, 10 colors, 10 types clothes, 10 shapes, 10 words for math, 10 words for bloggers, etc. You take them 10 at a time until you exhaust the list. This is how we learn our maternal language.
By the way, this is obviously a widget that builds one’s vocabulary, but it does not teach a language. Language is far more than a lexicon. A living language can only be learned from a living human being. But this is decent for what it is meant to do.
Another great language learning web app is http://smart.fm (previously iknow.co.jp). They are expanding fast and have nice features like Facebook Connect and OpenID. Definitely worth checking out.
Looks very promising, however I couldn’t find the iPhone utility at the Canadian app store. Does anyone knows why?
Hi Yaniv,
We don’t have a native iPhone app at the moment, it is only available as a web app.
All you need to do is visit http://m.learn10.com on your iPhone browser.
Mike @widgetyegg
http://www.learn10.com
Got it. Thanks!
Will support in learing a new language. Interesting.