ReCAPTCHA Founder's New Startup: Killing Two Birds With One Stone
duolingo.com
duolingo.com
I feel like a lot of websites, especially the ones which want me to sign up or understand their service, throw way to much crap at me for it to make sense. Two sentence mission statements, ominous screenshots, and cheeky feature lists only go so far --- in this case I appreciate the straightforward mission statement.
Easily the best talk of the conference - he's a great (and engaging) speaker.
I think this google talk is roughly the same presentation:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
His other popular class is called "Science of the Web," which is similarly open-ended.
He's undoubtedly a great teacher, but the other professors are also very competent; albeit in less sexy topics.
A few things that may be of interest to the HN crowd:
* This project is currently academic in nature, funded by grants he has received. However, he does see an opportunity to monetize the product if they choose to by offering translation services to companies or organizations in the future.
* The product is currently in testing. According to their metrics, the crowd-sourced translation is as accurate a professional translator. At TEDxCMU, he showed a professional translation side-by-side to a Duolingo created translation - the two were nearly identical. Likewise, according to their metrics, the education received is as good or better than the leading language education solutions (ie, Rosetta Stone).
* He showed some amazing projections on how quickly they can translate a set of text from one language to another. I forget the exact projections so don't hold me to this, but with 1,000 users it would take, say, 3 months to translate English Wikipedia into Spanish. With 1M users, it would take less than a week.
All in all pretty amazing.
Anyone have a blog link where someone (anyone, really) says some more information about this?
We teach you fun and interesting ways to talk like the locals, and also use language to provide insights into the culture.
We've been busting our butts for the past few months and are getting excited for our launch on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo!).
Stuff like "the friend" is translated to "de vriendin". Or "near the sea" can't be translated as "bij de zee" but has to be translated to "vlakbij de zee". A lot of them are context dependent as well, and don't make sense the way they are presented.
"Forward" is one I kept running into, it can be translated in two different ways depending on the context, "naar voren" or "vooruit" (BTW, define: vooruit in Google doesn't give you anything, search in de Dikke Van Dale a Dutch Dictionary). It made it immensely frustrating to go through Level 1 and I just gave up after a while.
Also, any words that are context dependent should have an example that clarifies the meaning: e.g. for "the friend" the example given is "After I told my friend, she started crying." so you know it concerns a woman, not a man.
In general, inglua works much better if you use it as intended, that is, to learn languages you barely speak at all (and that's obviously the use case I aim for).
For example, here's what Japanese people are saying about Fukushima: http://twitmersion.com/ja/Fukushima
Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the magic incantation to get the courtesy limit raised at Google, nor any way to pay for more capacity so it will probably get rate limited for the day pretty quickly.
I thought it's "killing two pigs with one bird" now. Language start-up should be more aware about these things.