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Comment by lars512 | Hacker News Reader

Hi guys, I'm the author. Here's a related blog post I did introducing the game:

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!

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Hi, great game. A little suggestion. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages are too similar to differentiate for non native speakers. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian. Basically, the division is more political than linguistical.

A language is a dialect with an army.

And a navy.

Don't forget the air force!

Depending on region, it's even hard to differentiate for a native speaker. (I am a native Serbo-Croatian speaker)

Anyways - great game!

(Disclaimer: I am a native croatian speaker.) There's a significant difference between croatian and serbian language: croatian language is composed of three dialects and a standard language which are not found in serbian. It was a political movement to merge one of those dialects (shtokavian) with serbian language. So, serbian is somewhat similar to shtokavian but not to other dialects that compose the rest of the croatian language.

I, as a native Serbian speaker, have a 100% understanding of what is being said on Croatian national TV, and 100% understanding when reading websites in Croatian.

While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.

I have probably the same understanding of serbian. I used to read a lot of science fiction literature translated into it. Not to mention that I learnt cyrillic script in elementary school in the 1980's when the language was still officially called "serbo-croatian". But there are significant differences: for example serbian people don't understand kaykavian and refuse to. There are a lot of jokes on the theme in old yugoslavian tv shows. Kaykavian is part of croatian language.

And...we have our unavoidable example showing that any public statement on languages vs dialects becomes political and controversial.

I am not sure what you mean. I tried to explain the situation. "Serbo-croatian" as such doesn't exist (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/535405/Serbo-Croat...). Yeah, you can mix both of them and speak serbo-croatian as a mixture of both, but people also mix english language with their mother tongues. How many kids today name their language as "croatian-english" or "german-bosnian" for example? And I heard both of these in real-life situations.

I'm personally bothered that I haven't seen Mandarin, even though I've seen Cantonese a few times. :P

Mandarin's in there, keep at it!

Great idea, and very fun!

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 first point, the game's randomness is biased towards easier languages earlier, and harder languages later. But I didn't want to bring with me a preconceived notion of what languages people would find hard. If you were to track your maximum score, you'd probably find it trend upwards as you trained. So scores are still useful in that regard.

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 :)

I encountered a whole lot of lag. Some buttons took 5+ seconds to respond.

Yeah, sorry about that. I'd planned a little more infrastructure work before submitting it to HN. Wish me luck :)

Good luck!

I hope we've learned a valuable lesson about deserting ops teams today.

First db switchover has occurred, so far so good.

Infrastructure is good, but some of the lag could be fixed with code. For example: the page should already know whether a given answer is correct, and give a response without needing to hit the server at all. This would give you instantaneous feedback, which the user can digest while the next audio file is cached. As it is, having to wait 5-10 seconds for my button-presses to register is really killing the enjoyability of what is otherwise a very cool concept.

You don't want the correct answer on the client before the answer is submitted - it would be trivial to cheat by extracting the answer with a little bit of reverse engineering.

If people want to cheat that badly, let 'em.

Is that a problem? I presume you're not offering prizes.

Try it again today, when the servers are actually running smoothly. You'll find the experience different.

you could just add some simple loading animation gif, to make it clear that buttons are working...

Thank you! I think I was lucky, being bulgarian and knowing how most of slavanian languages sound like. Also I can very easily distinguish between non-slavanian west-european ones (french, german, italian, spanish, portuguese).

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.

A cool game worth a couple of plays. I found myself often making educated guesses based on the speaker's accent, not the language itself (i.e. I thought of where I'd think the person was from if the same speaker was speaking English).

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.

Might be cool to weight scores per round based on speed of selection. That will, however, favour even more those who get easy combos or languages. French, Thai, Arabic, Cantonese, Italian, etc are all very easy when compared with differentiation between Yugoslavian languages or guessing some that I either hadn't heard of (Kannada) or I'm much less familiar with (Scandinavian).

Yeah, the Kannada one tripped me up too. I figured it must've been some inuit language - Only afterwards did I realise it's an Indian language (No, the other kind of indians).

And good luck distinguishing between scandinavian languages if you're not native. I'm Danish and I sometimes confuse Swedish with Norwegian.

I don't know how much of an exposure you have to various cultures, but I hope you keep in mind that many Indians find it offensive when you call them "the other kind of indians".

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.

...the other kind of indians.

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.

> Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them?

The put-down is that Asian Indians are "the other kind", which implies second-class.

Doesn't it just imply second to come to mind, which is fair enough depending on your location? Doubt class is a consideration at all.

> ... by historical geographical misunderstandings

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...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indies

Regarding Caucasian, why would you get annoyed? Words can and often do have multiple appropriate meanings. One of the wonderful things about natural language is our ability to distinguish among different word meanings based on context.

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.

> Words can and often do have multiple appropriate meanings.

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.

Historically, "East Indian" meant something else entirely.

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?

> some hillbilly somewhere might not appreciate the many nuances of differing cultural practices

Are you seriously offering that as your reason too? That some hillbilly does it?

I'm done here.

Yeah, weighting based on speed would be a cool idea. Thanks!

Great! One suggestion: Add a wikipedia link to the language that is displayed when the player gets it wrong, that way you can quickly read up on where it is spoken etc.

Actually, after each try you could have a snippet about each language, e.g.

    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.

You get the writing sample from ka.wikipedia.org, and the awesomeness from places like http://wals.info/ , http://www.ethnologue.com/ , http://omniglot.com/ (or just searching google scholar for the language name and clicking random articles, always fun)

Oh that's a great idea, very educational and I'd love reading stuff like that while playing this game!

(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!

> 15/15, still got 3 lives

.. 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?"

That's a good suggestion, I should layout the same buttons but with the incorrect one marked. Thanks!

also, instead of just "you got it", how about a greeting in that language?

also, how about localisation of the game?

I LOVE this. This is something I've been doing on my own for most of my life. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at picking out what languages people are speaking but Dinka is really hard. Distinguishing between some of the Balkan languages is harder than I remember.

It's be great if there were an iOS app of this. You'd easily get my $2. :)

Thanks for the support! I'll definitely have a think about it. I'd have to collect my own sound samples to make a commercial product, but it's an interesting option.

Cool game! Reminds me of Omniglot's language quizes http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=9100

700 here.

Cool game, and nicely presented! I got a 250, then 400.

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.

I'm recording GeoIP country and the Accept-Languages header from their request. Hopefully this generates some interesting data to pore over later. Monthly data snapshots might be useful for researchers.

Showing a distribution of scores would be cool too. EDIT: D'oh. Just saw the "stats" link. Would still be nice to see a distribution of scores.

One way to make the game harder is to remove clips that have obvious references to proper nouns tied to one country. Many of my correct answers came from hearing the name of a person or place associated with one of the languages.

I try to eliminate these cases. If you notice one, email me with the language it was and I'll fix it.

Great game! Found a bug though. When the game is over, if you hit the browser back button, it will let you continue the game.

Thanks for reporting it, I'll take a look.

I hit next twice after guessing correctly, which triggered a Python KeyError.

Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe

Thanks for this -- I was (embarassingly) running in debug mode due to a bad code snippet in my runserver script. Your report helped me fix both the KeyError and the debug mode.

>/root/languagegame/languagegame/db.py

Running the web-page under root sounds dangerous.

That was fun! I got 300. I only speak English fluently, although I've studied French and German. However, I am very interested in phonetics and have read up on the sound systems of lots of languages and that helped a lot. Thanks, I plan to play it again.

You are directly sending a POST request to the {domain}/play/ URL I presume. I gave the URL to my friend and it gave him a 405 Method Not Allowed error.

Yeah, I can see how that would be annoying. I'll redirect GET requests to /play/ back to the homepage. Thanks for the heads up!

Where can we see the list of all the languages available? Is Quechua available? (Peruvian/Bolivian and the incas native language )

I'll have to make a page showing the available languages.

Are you a Quechua speaker? I'd love to add it.

Not quite, I can barely dabble a few words but it is widely spoken here in Peru.

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

Great idea. It would be nice to see a chart with the distribution of scores though or at least the quartiles next to the high score.

Definitely a very cool concept, but the code could be improved a bit. I'd ideally like to see something like this primarily to be run via Javascript. Then once you guess it'd just download a new audio clip + the correct answer... way less lag.

The site was quite degraded -- try it again now.

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