The Great Language Game: How many languages can you distinguish between?
greatlanguagegame.com
greatlanguagegame.com
http://quietlyamused.org/blog/2013/09/01/introducing-the-gre...
Feedback's much appreciated, and if you encounter any bugs, please report them via email to lars+glg@yencken.org
If there's a language you'd like to see that's missing, consider helping out by finding some good quality language samples or news podcasts in that language and emailing me.
Enjoy!
It might be good to ask the user where they are from (non-intrusively of course, maybe a simple country selector or IP lookup) to get another dimension on the statistics. Or what languages they already know as well might be interesting when looking at the results.
A suggestion: I really don't like the design of having the next question be a new browser history entry. It took me about 20 back clicks to get back to HN to post this comment.
And good luck distinguishing between scandinavian languages if you're not native. I'm Danish and I sometimes confuse Swedish with Norwegian.
I'll put it in a manner you can understand. I see that you're Dane. I suppose the US has a significant populace with Danish ancestry. How would you like it if they refer to you as the other kind of Dane. I've also come across anecdotes where Brits visiting the US were told by some rude people to learn to speak English properly.
In an American context, it is understandable to think "Indian" signifies "American Indian". Now that East Indian immigration verges on outnumbering American Indians, that will probably change, but it's pretty silly to get offended by historical geographical misunderstandings. I mean, let's vilify Columbus for the right reasons. Besides, what's wrong with Native Americans? Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them? It's not like someone called you "French". b^)
...learn to speak English properly.
It is a truth universally acknowledged among speakers of English who've spoken with many other speakers of English, that the worst English-speakers are the English. I find the Irish to be the most intelligible and melodious, especially those Irish who have lived overseas. "BBC" English, however, is not the way that most English people speak, and besides the UK has no monopoly on that dialect.
The put-down is that Asian Indians are "the other kind", which implies second-class.
If only it were just historical!
> Besides, what's wrong with Native Americans?
Nothing! That's an excellent term.
> Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them?
I never said anything about it being a put-down. To me, it's just annoying when people write "Indian" and assume that it will be understood to mean "Native American".
My point (with bringing up Danes and Brits too) was that some manners of speaking reek of ignorance. "In an American context" sounds like a weak excuse to perpetuate expressions rooted in ignorance. For example, when I learnt of the appropriate meaning of the word "Caucasian"[1], I stopped using it to refer generally to people of European descent. Now, I get annoyed when Americans use it that way ;-)
> Now that East Indian immigration ...
"East Indian" does not mean to me what it means to you. I'm South Indian. Historically, "East Indian" meant something else entirely [2].
[1]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/01/stop-using-th...
Anyone who insists upon only a single meaning for each word will have a considerably poorer vocabulary because of it.
Furthermore, if you're going to rule out all words with spurious etymologies, I suspect you're going to have to eliminate quite a lot of words from your vocabulary. For example, stop using "turkey" to refer to the bird eaten in certain parts of the world.
You seem to greatly overestimate our ability to distinguish among different word meanings based on context. The meanings are not all appropriate when they conflict. I first discovered this conflicting meaning of "Caucasian" when discussing something with a Polish friend. Unlike me, he did not default to the popular American meaning of "Caucasian". That led to us misunderstanding each other for a few minutes. "Indian" has caused me enough headaches online. I'll reiterate: not everyone defaults to popular American (mis-)usages.
Leave aside the matter of popular usage for the time being. Do you also think that if population geneticists were to use all these conflicting meanings, it would cause them no problems at all?
I hope my explanation also disabuses you of the notions that I'm "[insisting] upon only a single meaning for each word" or trying to "rule out all words with spurious etymologies". Don't worry about me having a considerably poorer vocabulary; I do extremely well on most tests. When I write, people may have trouble understanding my point, but it's never been because I used to wrong words. Addendum: if it were to turn out that I have used the wrong words, I'd learn, and correct myself.
Is that also "annoying" to you? After all, some hillbilly somewhere might not appreciate the many nuances of differing cultural practices between Sumatra and Tamil Nadu. Worse yet, she might not even care! Is there any aspect of any European language that doesn't annoy you?
Are you seriously offering that as your reason too? That some hillbilly does it?
I'm done here.
It's be great if there were an iOS app of this. You'd easily get my $2. :)
700 here.
I'd love to see a couple of adjustments:
First, the scores right now aren't very meaningful. The chance of winning each round is highly dependent on being lucky with the multiple choices (e.g. I'll always be able to guess Spanish vs. anything else, but my if options are two African languages, it's a coin toss). I think the distribution of scores over several games will end up being similar to playing a series of random coin tosses. My own scores varied greatly.
Second, it would be great to have more clips of each language, without having the same person speaking twice. The educational element of the game gets lost when you start overtraining on the same clip.
Exactly! I got Swedish vs. some Asian language once, correctly guessed swedish and then the next round was the same audio clip and some other languages. The game had told me that it was swedish already, so it was easy.
On the second point -- I completely agree. Validating the samples takes time, but I promise I'll add more as soon as I can.
Thanks for playing :)
Kannada
Primarily spoken in: India
# of speakers: 38 million
Language family: Dravidian
Writing sample: ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ಬರೆಯಿರಿ
Is awesome because: Reduplication! You write the word
twice, replacing the start of the second one with 'gi-',
to get "and related things". So if "books" is
'pustaka', "books and related things" is
'pustaka-gistaka'. Awesome.
(Especially since you have to wait quite a bit before the next sample loads. Which, as some others have pointed out, shouldn't have to be that slow. How many minutes of audio does this game have in total? I think using a modern codec (say OGG or AAC, not MP3) you could go with a pretty low bitrate (VBR), would it be feasible to just load all the clips in one chunk and play slices of that?)
Another idea for extra information: show on a world/continent map where this language is spoken. I expected to do really bad at this game since I am awfully bad at geography. But it turns out I'm doing pretty good (15/15, still got 3 lives, but I'm taking a break), since I'm pretty good with language I guess (even though I only speak NL/EN/DE and a bit FR), I know enough about others to make an educated guess. And of course you don't need to know where something is to guess the language :) Seriously, ask me to point those places on a map and I'd fail miserably--hence showing the location(s) where it's spoken would be a welcome training for me :)
To the maker of this game: great work! Love it!
.. and then I got 3 wrong in a row :) so, 750 points.
Question to the author: last one I got wrong was Turkish. I would've definitely considered that if I had seen the option, but I don't remember I did. I probably just overlooked it. But it would be nice if it'd show all the options with the wrong one red and the right one green or something, just to comfort any thoughts of "was that a bug or did I overlook something?"
also, how about localisation of the game?
Anyways - great game!
While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.
Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe
Running the web-page under root sounds dangerous.
My only advice is to avoid having the same language, or at least same wave file being played twice in a row (It happened few times with me, and I've played it for 5 times in a row).
Also maybe introduce something like in the TV shows, where you can get use "jokers" (hints) such as - remove half of the languages that are not (when there are more than 4 or 5 I guess), etc.
Or maybe let the player risk, by asking for more languages even on lower levels, but for more points.
It's entertaining :) I was actually thinking if you are in the car, and listening to this as a game how would one be able to answer (google glass with eye tracking?), or maybe that's just bad idea for driving.
Are you a Quechua speaker? I'd love to add it.
here is a link of a youtube where it is spoken clearly (maybe you can use that ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjTi4q_kIo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian...
The difference between Punjabi and Hindi is also pretty subtle. Mistaking Thai for Vietnamese, though, was inexcusable. =(
Also, this serves as a pretty handy hint that when you're completely stumped by something you've never, ever heard before, the answer is probably "Dinka": http://greatlanguagegame.com/stats/
But that would be a cool game too for programmers. Here is a snippet of code, what language it is in?
The only languages I can actually speak are English, and a little French.
I'm easily able to break 1000 points but some of those African languages (Dinka) are really hard!
I'm so thankful for this site. It's really really cool!
For me specifically, shortwave radio. I still have a R-75 hooked up although I don't often use it anymore. I used to have a R-390 and its "mobile" cousin the R-392.
I've found the audio quality has little or nothing to do with the appeal of listening to foreign lands, so listening over the internet has had little if any change in that hobby vs using a radio. Although I do get most of my non-tech news from the BBC now, so I do appreciate the podcast feeds, something you could never do with radio.
I think most HN readers would appreciate BBC Radio 4's "In our time" program. Not every episode, especially not the more science/tech oriented, but most episodes are entertaining / mind expanding. I get it as a podcast via a RSS feed.
I would think all the startup opportunities relating to podcasting are long since used up? There seems to be a way to monetize anything people spend time/money/effort on, and at least some people do that with podcasts, so logically there must be a way to make money off them...
Ditto.
I'm also a shortwave fan, and I also find it less interesting as time passes. But there's a concrete reason -- there are fewer interesting shortwave programs, mostly in response to the rise of the Internet, podcasting and satellite radio.
Many shortwave bands, once teeming with interesting and useful content, have been taken over by niche broadcasters like religious groups, or ordinary broadcasts that have shifted to the shortwave bands from the AM broadcast band in tropical areas to avoid excessive noise. Overall, less interesting shortwave content.
Apropos of nothing, for years I believed that one of my favorite AM radio stations for long-distance reception (KGO near San Francisco, 810 kHz) had its frequency to itself -- was a "clear-channel" broadcaster. I recently discovered that this hasn't been true for decades -- there are now 182 U.S. domestic AM stations on that one frequency. I was shocked.
I speak French and Japanese, and I've spent a lot of time with Poles, but I still only got 500.
One tricky thing I noticed was that there was one audio clip that was in Urdu, but it was discussing something written in Arabic. Indeed, the clip had more Arabic than Urdu. Fortunately, Arabic wasn't an option, so I got it right.
That's the kind of edge case that might appear in other clips as well, and might be something to watch out for.
for this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
it ended up in this place: http://www2.fi.edu/
and got a 522 Timed Out error. Thhbbbbt.
I'll see what I can do about it.
Meh, only scored 350, although in my defense I am quite deaf at the moment (temporarily).
I was also lucky as I got Mandarin twice (which I've studied) and German once (same.)
Two of my three errors were picking the wrong one of the two plausibles once the number to choose was 3 or 4.
With higher quality audio (and functioning ears) I think I could have got higher (so I could hear more of the sounds being used.)
Played second time, 650, and third time 950.
I've got lucky again, since Dutch was twice in a row, and few other languages.
It's cool, reminds a bit of Google's find this place on earth, by "driving" around until you see a sign, or some very known place.
I've only been there on holidays but it doesn't sound right to me, perhaps it's just the low quality of the sample but the phonemes seem far more 'Eastern' to me.
A cool variant on this game could be "guess where this English accent is from."
("I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other" – I highly doubt that. Dialects/languages differ more and more the closer they are to your own; I can tell if someone grew up a 15 minute drive away from me, but if the choice is between a place that is e.g. >3 hrs north vs >4hrs north I have a really hard time placing them.)
UPDATE: never mind, its not when the audio finishes playing, its just slow to load.
It would improve fairness of the game and avoid a lot of confusion not to allow these languages appear in the answers together.
Also, Croatian and Serbian can only be distinguished by words. You can't recognize the intonation because it's the same. If you don't know words specific to these languages, you won't be able to tell the difference.
It would be best to have a filter that prevents them being in the same question.
If it felt sluggish for you yesterday, please try the game again and enjoy it as it's meant to be played!
I got a few immediate repeats of the same language; maybe preventing those would be a good idea?
Pruning immediate repeats is in the todo list, thanks for the recommendation.
Big lag! I hope this is because lots of people are playing :)
The quiz is most difficult when presenting me with choices between slavic combinations (Ukranian/Polish/Russian) and far east weirdness: Tamil / Burmese / Malay.
What's so weird about those languages? All three languages you mentioned are linguistically very different and have long histories (particularly Tamil).
I wouldn't call them far east either. These languages are predominantly spoken in South and South-east Asia.
(I am from Singapore where Tamil and Malay are official languages)
And they ARE far east, if you're European. :)