I'm making a website to help English learners practice speaking with native speaker recordings
I just launched the landing page for Vocabulaid, which is a website for practicing English pronunciation.
The idea is that the learner can click through sets of English words accompanied by a native speaker recording from the Forvo API. I thought the tool could be good for learners to improve vocabulary, pronunciation, and master the really tricky words like drought, laugh, etc. Is this a good idea? Should the service be aimed at foreigners who want to learn English or English-speakers who want to learn a foreign language?
I like the idea. English pronounciation has fooled me multiple times.
Currently, I use online dictionaries to check how to say a specific word. Most of the dictionaries have a little speaker icon to listen to the pronounciation. Another interesting website is youglish.com. Nevertheless, I'm still looking for better tools to improve my English. Ideally, I'd like to have one tool that enables me to create my own lists of vocabularies with images, pronounciation and example sentences. For visual vocabulary, I'm currently using google docs which let me easly add pictures for given words, but it's a hassle to find and add audio.
Perhaps if I did a custom-decks feature I could have it to where you type in the word, and it automatically grabs the audio and an image from somewhere.
Yeah, I could do a platform like where you can add your own words or select from pre-made decks. It will add native speaker recordings to it so you don't have to. Does that sound interesting?
Also, I think the whole idea needs more work, like there needs to be some more interaction with the site than just seeing flash cards. I'm just not sure yet what I should do for that.
Definitely, I think that enabling people to create and share their own learning content will make your service more attractive.
On the other hand, I'd be careful with adding to many features upfront. I've told you about my requirements for a perfect English learning tool, but it may be a trap 😉 Try to launch a MVP and collect feedback from real users.
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As a non-native English speaker, I would be highly interested in some useful service for development speaking / listening skills. But to be honest I don't understand how just listening recordings can help.
Just listening is not enough. There should be some exercises, challenges, games to push it into the brain.
@Zencentric @thomasm1964 I think it needs more work too. Maybe I should go for a spaced repetition-based system where the learner can use their own words, or choose from pre-defined decks. They can select what mediums they want to practice with: images, video, audio, sentences, definitions, etc. Then, Vocabulaid will automatically make them a tailored lesson using those mediums. The learner doesn't have to provide them. That is the difference between this and other services.
Thank you for responding!
No problem, just keep in mind that just repetition is not enough either. First of all, it doesn't work, secondly, it's boring. Like I can't use Duolingo for this reason - it's soooooo boring, and I saw other flaws there too.
How do you like to learn languages? It's a hobby of mine so I like to know about any different methods.
20 years ago when my English was very-very poor I played a computer game with dialogs in English. It helped me to improve my vocabulary.
Another way is communication. I worked in a small company and suddenly I had clients from US. My conversational English was bad but it improved very fast because I had to communicate with them (using chat only).
That's what helped me. And I liked these ways.
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Vocabulaid will have media like videos in it. The user puts their wordlist into the website, selects what mediums they want to use to practice, and the site will then make a customized SRS-based learning session with whatever medium the learner wants.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
That's a cool idea. Maybe if that doesn't exist I could definitely think about it sometime.
On your response, the voices in Google Translate aren't native speakers; they're robots. They sound really unnatural and slow imo. I wrote another response going into some more detail about the service.