Ask YC: Feedback on startup: learnitlists.com

1. There's something very wrong with the English/German translation. It's frequently not finding the German equivalent and just printing the English word. e.g. It claims that the German translation of Cook is Cook.

2. When presenting a word like Cook you really need to distinguish between nouns and verbs. There's a big difference between der Koch and kochen.

3. You don't present the gender of any of the words. This is very important if you are to learn almost any language other than English. You just can't make the adjectives etc. match if you don't know the gender (and there are words that change meaning with gender: e.g. le tour and la tour in French).

4. I think it would be very helpful to have the words actually spoken outloud by your widget.

5. My experience of learning a foreign language to fluency is that there's no substitute for speaking to people. For my first months in France I was constantly asking people in shops, the street, etc. to explain bits of French to me. For example, I'd pick a word in a newspaper headline and ask the baker what it meant. This really helped. Currently I'm learning German and find myself asking people Wie sagt man X auf Deutsch? a lot.

One thing that bothers me is clutter, clear messaging should be in place on the homepage.

The multiple pictures are eye grabbers so they take away from the text that matters. Like for instance, I think "You can now learn a few words of your chosen language every day." Should be WAY BIGGER AND IMPORTANT.

I like easy, as does everyone else, so make juice worth the squeeze.

Like : http://www.chatterous.com/ http://coordinatr.com/ http://script.aculo.us/ http://foamee.com/ http://rescuetime.com/forbiz http://heysan.com/

I think those have clear messaging and purpose. I dont have to think what it is really...I think this will increase your user signups. As well as making that sign up button WAY bigger.

Additionally, that sign up page it has "I am Learning" then an options like "German <> English"...What's that about? Why not just ask me what language I want to learn and what language I speak don't confuse me... I mean what does that even mean anyway...

Also, when I click one word and it loops through the list, I meant for the word to translate on the other side, not have the flashing red words in the top left...

And what's with the poll? lol

That's everything from me. Sorry if I tore you up, but hey at leasts it's honest feedback, right?

Great idea, here's some thoughts: - I signed up and it put me in a google gadget widger page, but it's not actually a google gadget. http://widget.learnitlists.com/orkut/index/google_gadget is the url I am talking about. It was just kind of confusing to be put in there

- I was tossed into it without any explanation and words began revealing themselves if I clicked on things but I could not type in the words I knew (Or is that not how it works?) It looked like I was supposed to begin typing/guessing the words but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Great front page though, made me want to try it right away

1. Not too useful for lower-level Japanese (many many people, myself included) without providing optional readings for the kanji. (The workaround is a browser extension like RikaiChan.) 2. Front page is cluttered 3. Didn't want to register, did anyway 4. How do I get it on my iGoogle page? It wasn't clear after about 15 seconds, which is way too long. It should have given me a choice just after I hit "go".

Learnitlists is a startup of a friend of mine. It is curently in beta, but they already have 10K users. He asked me to post it here to get your feedback. Thanks.

Hello all,

The english/german translation has now been verified by a professional translator. We are now in the process of having every language verified. We've added info about the word type - noun, verb etc. Likewise, gender. We've added the speaking teacher to say the word, plus there is a facility for native speakers and learners to make recordings of their daily words - this is particularly important for languages where a text to speech engine is not available, such as Welsh or Hindi. Immersion is the best way to learn a language, but having a bank of 1000 words to pull from really helps comprehension in the early days. Look out for our new release on the 1st August. Many thanks for your feedback, Nicola

Hi, this is Nicola from Learnit lists.

We are currently running a private beta test of the next release of the widget, after identifying many of the concerns raised in these posts in previous research.

If you would be interested in helping us with a private beta test of the next release, please contact me on info at learnitlists dot com.

Many thanks for your time.

Great Idea: learning another language without much effort, certainly need improvements. Question how do you make money?

Some of the widgets seem slow to load. Don't want to register to try it out.

Thanks for comments. We (=learnitlists.com) plan on improving the widget, now 2.0 version is being developed.

I would especially appreciate your thoughts about the user interface. Is the widget easy to use?

Thanks to everybody for honest feedback. That is what I want to hear :)