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Show HN: Crowdsourced Language Learning Site

littlelingua.eu

54 pointsgraylien30 comments

so I thought this page was some elaborate crowdforce powered learning language site but saddened to discover it's just a clever clickbait with affiliate links to existing commercial and free websites.

I recommend these websites.

https://www.thespanishexperiment.com/

https://www.thefrenchexperiment.com/

https://www.theitalianexperiment.com/

https://www.thegermanproject.com/

There are no affiliate links at all. These are great recommendations, thanks for contributing! Also, we have the spreadsheets open for anyone to edit and contribute - this is what is meant by crowdsourced.

these are all pay sites

http://www.clickonfrench.com/?ref=littlelingua

https://www.talkinfrench.com/?ref=littlelingua

https://www.newsinslowfrench.com/?ref=littlelingua

You can filter between paid and free. And of course, there are paid sites - if they were not paid, they probably wouldn't exist.

> There are no affiliate links at all.

So this is false.

> These are great recommendations

Those were already on your website.

What qualifies as an affiliate link ? To me it is a link that you get from an affiliate scheme to make money from selling their product. We don’t have any of them.

Okay good that the links are already in the site - you can’t expect me to remember every link from the top of my head

The “ref” part of your links to paid services certainly satisfies the expectations of an affiliate link for just about everyone. If you are not getting something in return for linking to them, why did those links need to carry your identity?

Why not show our identity? It might let people know about the site and help to grow it. webdesignernews.com and producthunt.com do this, and when I see incoming ref links, I always feel thankful towards them. What is the negative effect?

attaching tracking links with your id for paid website by all definitions affiliate marketing 101. maybe change the title to include the word "Directory" or "Link Portal".

I can't say any clearer, we have no affiliate links. The '?ref=littlelingua' appended to every URL is the same as Product Hunt links having '?ref=producthunt'. We are not making money from it. It is not affiliate marketing.

But even if it was, I don't know what would be wrong with that. It's a useful resource, and would benefit from a source of revenue to improve it further. What's going on here? Read this: http://www.cyrilchandelier.com/dont-be-a-free-user

Haters gonna hate. I think you are doing a good job so ignore these comments and continue.

If you monetize too, I don't think its immoral. Money is the driving force of Capitalism so taking money for a useful service is not a sleazy activity.

Definitely, thanks for voicing your thoughts here, other audiences we have shared this with have also been very supportive so we will definitely continue :)

I think we have very different values.

This is an example of a dark pattern. You create a clickbait title, for what is more than just a collection of websites with affiliate links, slap on a buzzword.

I've never attacked you personally, I just asked you to be more transparent. I can't be the only one thinking I landed on a affiliate landing page.

The main problem with recommending paysites you share profit with is it contradicts the entire purpose of crowdsourcing, which is building consensus based on the wisdom of the crowd, not the sole proprietor of the website seeking to benefit commercially.

Note that I've never mentioned it was wrong to make money, but simply telling you I was misled, like among others, to a clickbait affiliate landing page.

If this was crowdsourced I would've gone about differently, but if you feel attacked then I think that just speaks for itself.

Hello, there are no affiliate links. I have even removed the ?ref thing for you too.

I don't know which are the clickbait affiliate landing pages you're referring to. It'd be helpful if you would mark on the spreadsheet which links you believe to be clickbait affiliate links. That would help me make sense of your feedback, as right now it is unclear to me.

what will be the problem with making money via referral unless they are actively promoting shady businesses just to collect referral money.

Thanks! I do not see the problem either. It's a fun project born out of our own problem, and as language learners, we just aim to make a useful resource for people like us.

I run a side project in the language learning space, and I received this email below a few days ago: === Hi XXX team,

We've had some interest about advertising on our homepage ahead of our Product Hunt launch on Friday and we thought we'd open up the opportunity to everybody. Have a look at the site and let us know if you're interested in any available space.

littlelingua.eu

Best, XXX XXX ===

I find this practice horrible.

What is your objection? I am curious to know.

Hey, to clear things up we weren't looking for money as we have no stats or anything. We were only looking to feature decent products, and it's nice to work with people we are featuring. Thanks for the feedback though!

Now we are crowdsourced and anybody can submit resources.

Every time one of my OSS projects gets in the front page of HN I get the same obnoxious email from "betalist" or "betapage" or something like that about getting my "startup" promoted. I just mark them as spam everytime, hopefully Gmail starts catching up at some point.

Hi everyone, I'm working on a crowdsource language learning project.

We started by gathering resources like podcasts, apps and websites, but are also aiming to map out all the different language schools in each country to make them more discoverable.

Check out the spreadsheet here to add your suggestions. There's a tab just for language schools too: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jXLjoDbXvl_IKeBwWdwI...

Cheers!

Scrolling through https://littlelingua.eu/resources , I noticed a few blank entries. You should probably fix those.

Also, I nominate https://tatoeba.org . It's a great source of example sentences and many apps make use of their data. If someone wants to contribute to the corpus, remember to only translate into your native language. Many people overestimate their second-language skills and write awkward sentences that waste other's time correcting them.

Yeah some of the entries need updating as it's crowdsourced, they're all from the spreadsheet so there must be a few duds in there.

Thanks for the suggestion of tatoeba too, that's excellent!

A way for the visitor to specify which type of ability he seeks (being able to write, to read, or only to speak) would be useful.

Great idea! I always found apps like duolingo are great for reading, but not ideal to learn how to speak.

I can probably add a new category for this and have it as a new filter.

There are a couple of features I feel are missing. 1) ability to filter by beginner/intermediate/advanced resources. 2) ability to rate & review resources and then sort by popularity/rating.

As it is I see a ton of resources for my target language, with no way to choose between them.

Nice work overall, this seems like a really useful idea especially for less popular languages!

Hi, thanks for your feedback. Rate and review is something we also identified as a top feature to add.

Filtering by ability is also needed. This is our first version, so these are in the pipeline.

I was surprised that I didn't see Memrise (https://www.memrise.com/) in the lists. I've switched to Duolingo myself in the past year but there are a lot of crowdsources resources there for heaps of languages.

neat!

:D thanks !

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