Feedback's much appreciated, and if you encounter any bugs, please report them via email to [email protected]
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the languages is labelled "Bangla", the transliterated form of the native spelling বাংলা. Given that you've used the English names of most languages there (I can't speak for all of them), I'd prefer the consistency of "Bengali" there.
Thanks for the feedback. Many of the languages have multiple aliases, I can't say I've made a principled choice in every case. But, updating to "Bengali" is in the todo list.
850. It would be a bit nicer if the randomly selected other language choices came from different language families: one of the three I got wrong was Bosnian vs Croatian, even though the difference is arguably a political construct (just don't say that to a Bosnian or Croat...).
2nd attempt 1050. Had precisely the same sound sample twice in a row though?
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/
Bosnian was certainly the tricky one for me: is it really the same clip every time? The first time I missed it, I thought I heard "bagus" so I guessed Malay. The second time I missed it I guess I really have no excuse! Still I got 600, and I don't feel bad for not being able to distinguish Gujarati from Punjabi from Urdu. It's been some time since I heard any of those languages spoken.
Nice! I noticed that I tended to identify the languages by their "fingerprint", certain phonemes and accents that characterize the language. It's probably not surprising that all three languages I missed were African languages. I've heard plenty of European and Asian languages, but rarely have I heard an African language.
I've been playing this game on my own now for decades...just trying to guess what language people are speaking eavesdropping on conversations and listening to radio.
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!
Same here, scored about 750 just by simplifying knowing kurdish was persian, so to listen for "indian" sounds, or Slovenia by listening for "eastern europe"
The only languages I can actually speak are English, and a little French.
It's amazing how distinguishable accents are. I wonder how much voice recognition software keys off of accent? I've a few South/Eastern Asia friends that never do well with spoken GPS recognition, but if it could know their native tongue was Gujarati or Thai then I imagine it could do a much better job of analyzing their English.
I was pleasantly surprised to make it to 800.
I work in the call centre space which deals with voice recognition IVRS. If there is no voice pack available for your specific country, a number of 'utterances' are collected to train the recogniser. So, yes, accents are used in the voice recognition software that I'm familiar with.
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.
One can do surprisingly well by knowing the geographic region a language is spoken, and imagining the accent of people from there, then matching it to the accent of the person speaking.
If you cop Assyrian vs Turkish first up, you might be flipping a coin quite early. I had two situations like that which chewed lives from the start! The other was Macedonian vs Serbian!
In the sound clip for Ukraine, the person actually says Ukraine (or very similar) a few times. Also, the snippets should be normalised. Some are very quiet.
There were several times when a fragment of which I had already guessed the language correctly came up again two or three rounds later, which made it a lot easier. I think it would be better to keep track of that, and have more fragments per language, and round-robin between those. Maybe I just got lucky, but I think 1200 for the first play is a good score. :)
I'd love to see some stats on how others have done. Also, it would be nice if you didn't have to press back fifty times (or long click select) to go back to the last site you were on.
I really like it. It would be cool if the score would be based on how quickly you answer too. Also, I would be very interesting to find correlation between how many/what languages user speak as native/learned to how many languages they can recognize. For example, it's funny how knowing just one Slavic language helps you not only to recognize any other ones (or in some easier cases understand a lot) but also spot the small differences in accents or vocabulary.
I got a 650. Surprising how easy it was to pick out what was Indo-European or Semitic, everything else was hard. Only got Indonesian because of The Act of Killing.
I was up to 800 points, and I got server error... (edit). Retried again, and since that was my last life, I've got it wrong. I was lucky though, as I got two times Bulgarian, and I'm from Bulgaria :)
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.
I think that Czech and Slovak languages are incredibly similar to each other. often times, when reading the instructions on some product in both languages, they differ by one word here and there. I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other.
A cool variant on this game could be "guess where this English accent is from."
[+] [-] lars512|12 years ago|reply
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 [email protected]
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!
[+] [-] radikal_shit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akamaka|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gamegoblin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malkia|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] peeters|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrich|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|12 years ago|reply
It's be great if there were an iOS app of this. You'd easily get my $2. :)
[+] [-] personlurking|12 years ago|reply
700 here.
[+] [-] kbaker|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asolove|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsuresh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stordoff|12 years ago|reply
Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe
[+] [-] rootbear|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alagappanr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clueless123|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewbrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lars512|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpatokal|12 years ago|reply
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. =(
[+] [-] jpatokal|12 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] jessaustin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|12 years ago|reply
But that would be a cool game too for programmers. Here is a snippet of code, what language it is in?
[+] [-] patrickg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twisol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] nemothekid|12 years ago|reply
The only languages I can actually speak are English, and a little French.
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsmeaton|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pitarou|12 years ago|reply
I speak French and Japanese, and I've spent a lot of time with Poles, but I still only got 500.
[+] [-] bilalq|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gamegoblin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|12 years ago|reply
for this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
it ended up in this place: http://www2.fi.edu/
[+] [-] pdknsk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahedo|12 years ago|reply
and got a 522 Timed Out error. Thhbbbbt.
[+] [-] lars512|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdjb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] royalghost|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pawelwentpawel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patmcguire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehwalrus|12 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] malkia|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] i-blis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koliber|12 years ago|reply
A cool variant on this game could be "guess where this English accent is from."