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Langoguessr

langoguessr.com

92 points_gfwu60 comments

Enjoyabe.

Still, I can guess the languages of 2/3 of the songs without hearing a word, by various letters on the screen (Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Hindi, Arabian, often Turkish, Kazakh, Chechen by their special letters). Faces and style often help more than the sound, too. (My highest score in solo mode without a timer is 104 so far).

Death metal tracks, highly distorted hip-hop tracks, ethereal choral track are usually hardest to determine.

Besides, it's a nice intro into various kinds of music all over the world, and across many decades. Worth playing just for that.

Heavy metal isnt too hard, just pick one of the Baltic countries or Finnish.

Mongolian black metal sounded pretty powerful. (But Mongolian has some pretty characteristic features which are easy to distinguish even then.)

Ya the Mongolian was weird. I too would pick Mongolian if the Baltics were not there. Something about being in the Soviet orbit.

I initially thought the challenge WAS to guess based on the screen. (Since there are no instructions)

I wish it weren't song-based, though it's an understandable implementation.

As others have noted, there are often many cues 'n' clues even before a single word is uttered. But also, I have trouble enough picking out words in my native tongue, let alone when transmogrified by musical prosody and accompaniment.

Today I learned that Polish sounds nothing like what I thought it sounded like :)

It gave me a completely instrumental song. Luckily the title was visible so I was still able to guess.

There's the report option for that. I got one too but they should be eliminated pretty quickly if the creator is actually acting on reports at all.

We definitely are! Reports are too important for us, we are actively evaluating reports and our first update has improved our system too much thanks to reports we got from community. We are glad that we have such a cooperative community.

Wow OP, such a simple and entertaining game. Good job!

I scored 290. As others noted, the text on screen is a big clue, but I think it's fine and can be a part of the game - the same goes for Geoguessr afterall (with the road markings or different kinds of Google cars, etc).

For some of the videos there is very little voice and/or it starts late and it's tricky to find with the progress slider. Perhaps the game could play the video from a timestamp of first spoken line. But on the other hand enjoying the full songs can be also nice and culturally enriching.

Getting Hebrew and Yiddish as options in the same round was tricky.

Strongly agree. I could see a "hard mode" in which you only get the audio, but I consider the clever use of all available clues (text, video content, appearance of performer) to be part of the game.

Love the concept! Would love it even more if you could opt out of seeing the album art which can give huge hints.

Yeah, one opening screen included "#tamilsoundservice". :) (Tamil is one of the languages) I suppose I could try to ignore the video, but it was fun trying to use it for clues. "Oh they look like Bollywood dancers so I'll guess Hindi." This backfired on me when I tried guessing one based on the subtitles I saw, which I assumed were for karaoke, but the answer was completely wrong. I guess they were for translation, not karaoke.

Yeah, I think to do this right you need to block all visuals. I was able to guess nearly all of mine correctly just from visual clues.

Part of the reason I did so, however, was because the lyrics were often drowned out by the music. Hard to guess when you can barely hear what’s being sung.

Yup, I didn't even have listen to most of them, just looked at the text available.

I think this is based on AI classification, so I'm not sure how reliable the answers are.

I got a full OnePiece episode, in Japanese, that was classified as "Danish". Doesn't inspire confidence into more similar-sounding languages

#2 on 'Infinite with Timer Limit' on the second attempt where I didn't get trolled by broken video.

Found some absolute bangers from unexpected countries. Better than any ML algorithm in terms of recommending interesting music.

Feedback:

* Broken videos are a problem.

* I don't have time to report broken video during play.

* I often wanted to check out songs, but no time to open/save them during play. I want some way to look up tracks after a session.

* The pop-up after each guess is animated. Animations are resource intensive and take up too much time. Do you need a pop-up at all?

* I want to (clearly) see my HP during the game.

* As someone else mentioned, the video images often give away the answer. Picture of Shiva? Probably Sanskrit.

Too bad there are a lot of clues in the video portion of clips. Also, the first challenge I got was obvious japanese (and there was anime art in the video), but none of the answers was 'japanese', so it got me confused. Turns out it was a mistake.

Overall, very enjoyable, but I think that whole video should be blurred, maybe even completely disabled.

Nice idea! Couple of bugs I came across during my game:

* an age-restricted video can show up (I am not logged-in to YouTube)

* a video is not guaranteed to actually have lyrics. Ony of my songs was a "danish" fully instrumental anime soundtrack

Another bug is that sometimes the video isn't available in my country.

Is that really a bug with the game, or a bug of YouTube/BigMedia licensing bullshit? /s

I'd say, both. I wish the licenses were fluid across apps/platforms.

Say, I have a right to listen to Madonna from my Youtube Music subscription? A game, with the given permission to access my "music licenses" should be able to use that.

There's a report video button on top of the video for these. Far too many incorrect videos ruins the game a bit: You're on a streak and no video means you can lose 3 lives. I've reported about 50 videos so far.

Thank you for taking your time and reporting those songs, we are actively developing our systems with the huge help of those reports! It means a lot!

Audio only would be far better but it might be easier just to start the video 15 seconds in.

I definitely was able to use some external clues from the videos even though they try to blur the hints. I would not necessarily guess Armenian from Turkish immediately but I am sure able to differentiate between Latin derived Turkish script on the screen and Armenian script.

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Hello folks, I am one of the two developers behind langoguessr.com. I've come across this website while googling the url and first of all I wanna thank each one of you for taking your time and playing it& sharing your criticisms and feedbacks. It mean a lot for us.

We just released our first update to website in the light of the feedbacks and we just included the first pass of the 'audio only' game mode. It is heavily WIP and subject to change, we are students in Final week so we had to deliver the request of the community so we published as it is. It will change heavily and it will has it's own gamemode&leaderboard.

We also updated our song picking algorithm so you will less likely to have those who are not suitable for our usecase. We are also developing an extra solution to address that too but it seems like it will take a little while. Thank you again for your kind words everyone.

Last but not least, please consider joining our discord too: https://discord.gg/mStEjq4Nm6

Agreed on the calls for letting the player hide album art and start in the middle of the track. Also had a bug where a Spanish song was classified as Latin.

Fun, and shows how little I know about language.

Few nitpicks:

- Some videos are blocked on copyright claims, would be nice if they would auto-reload - sometimes my mouse would reveal the title of the video (alt text)

I love the idea!

The indian subcontinent kinda has an unfair advantage to popping up with their 20-something languages. Very hard for me to distinguish between them, and the rest of SE Asia tbh.

Should definitely only play the audio to make it harder.

I found a slovak song that was singing in English, but I recognized the surname and put 2 and 2 together.

Europe also has 20-something languages.

52 with at least a million native speakers according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe . Of course, limiting it by number of speakers will exclude languages with strong political or cultural presence, just to mention a few, Maltese, Icelandic or Welsh.

First game: video comes up of a romanian artist "Adrian copilu' minune". Options are: hindi, tamil, spanish and belarussian.

Being a Romanian myself: very disappointed in both the choice of music as well as the mislabeling of the language.

I'm pretty sure it mislabeled a Japanese song as Dutch for me.

Needs to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese. 'Chinese' is not really a language.

Just tried. Too many videos unavailable, probably due to geographical issues.

If you’re on an iPhone you can power off then on to get to the Lock Screen. iOS will tell you the name and artist of the video that’s playing.

I don’t know if there’s a way for the author to disable that. But I think it’s a valid part of the metagame to use that information when guessing. Kinda like how the top geoguessr players use camera artifacts to deduce where the photo was taken.

I'm German of Turkish origin and I just now realized that I love how Slovenian sounds. What a densely colorful continent, perhaps only matched by India (Or perhaps Africa dunno).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-c4FviUf_A

Tried it. The second video was not available in my country (Portugal), and there is no option to report this, only "video is removed" (it's not, just region-blocked)

Definitely feel like I'm playing a bit more GeoGuessr than Langoguessr. First one was a music video where I could get a good guess on the location by the style of license plates and background scenery. Second was a still frame shot of an album cover featuring the Armenian flag. Third one had no defining features and suddenly I wasn't so good at the game!

Hey we just included an audio only mode, you might wanna try that too! It is our first pass of the system as described in our first comment here, we would be glad if you can share your experience!

A good side effect of this game is that you can find great songs from cultures that aren't as well represented in popular culture.

Is this a direct clone of languageguesser.com?

Honestly would prefer if it was audio-only. Too many ways to glean clues otherwise.

Unfortunately, the leaderboards are currently dominated by cheaters reporting times of 0.0s. However, once you exclude those then my current rank of #28 actually is #7, which isn't bad at all.

There needs to be a report for "There's an obvious give away in the video" one I got had a .bg web address and Cyrillic text and there was only one option of a Cyrillic language.

fails with older browsers

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And Safari

I LOVE this idea! But I think it's too easy to guess when using the video. If we could blue the entire video, I think that would make it much better.

This is cool, though it doesn't say how many I got right or wrong. It says my score is 285, but is that good or bad?

Had to guess for an instrumental piece and some black metal screams.

Otherwise a fun concept.

Like it ! Love to hear music from all over the world!!

Doesn't this mess up your YouTube what-to-watch-next suggestions?

I never stay logged into Google via a web browser, but I’m sure it would otherwise.

Wow, this is super fun, and a great sampler of a wide variety of music!

I was curious about the composition of music, therefore a friend and I created/curated frequency-domain visualizations of a variety of music in different languages and interesting sounds using the Welch power spectral density estimation algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform. The visualizations are fun to look at and with some practice you can distinguish the different instruments and vocal tracks in each song.

Chinese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cWixC3PVP8&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Russian / Ukrainian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysqIz8-pRSE&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsJtqF5hCyE&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRjxDSIx3Zs&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNY3HOnJiUc&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXCdJ1Lh-48&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

A few other examples which might be interesting:

1. Dialtone using dual-tone multi-frequency signaling and 56K dial-up modem connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomWraKuDFg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

2. Deluxe Multitone Car Alarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4uKcvZL7HM&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

3. Composition using only sounds from Windows 98 and XP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT-jr9sS6Y&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

4. Piano Music (Ballade Pour Adeline): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnAfrEk429w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

5. Electronic Music Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllJLIX1glg&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

6. Chiptunes (Mortimer's Chip-disko from Supertux): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWHAHPbYc0w&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

The 56k modem was so cool

Thanks, glad that you liked it!

The Megatronix SC620 Six Tone Car Alarm is also fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXYc0gtOswQ&list=PLn67ccdhCs...

As well as the a cappella Starships (Nicki Minaj cover) by Mike Tompkins which has a mind-blowing breakdown of how he built up the composition from different vocals at the end: https://youtu.be/vDqHpWY1UD4?t=209

awesome game !

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