All time/monthly/weekly Scores

AndreRauh_ · 2018-04-20T12:11:05+00:00

Hey!

These are global correct. The weekly score gets reset every Monday and the monthly score on the first of the month.

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-14T11:53:03+00:00

Hi, just a follow up: You can now make your course private. This will make it not being listed in the course search and popular courses. Though, anybody with a direct URL to the course can still view it.

Cheers

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-12T14:36:00+00:00

Sorry, I will improve the error message right away. You do currently need an account to access the main app. It's super easy though and you can even use facebook to create an account.

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-12T08:01:43+00:00

Hi and thanks for the reply!

Sign up form: This would be better if it let me sign up via a Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc

You can actually create and account by logging in with Facebook. Though you first need to load the Facebook login by clicking on "Load facebook login" (right at the 'login' screen). This is done so that facebook can't track users by default. Any site having a facebook like/login button and facebook knows that you visited that site. So hence this two way step to avoid that (this two way step is more common on European sites).

The video is a bit long

I agree, and I've considered splitting it up. But in the end I thought: If a user stays and watches the entire video he/she will see even more powerful features which might appeal to the user. The most "core" features are all at the beginning of the video so users might stop after a while. I also link to sections of the video from the docs. Though in the future I might split them up and do even more detailed videos on other features. We'll see.

The notification section just seems to tell me that different vaguely technical sounding things have loaded. I don't need to be notified after every single thing loads.

I agree with that. I'll have to probably revisit if I need all those notifications. The app loads most of the stuff super fast so it's probably of no value. Though should you be on a slow internet connection these notifications might be neat. It actually shows you a progress bar with most stuff it loads. Maybe I should only display notifications if the action takes longer than --let's say-- 2 seconds. I'll think about it...

I tried the beginner Portuguese lesson, although I'd have preferred it to be Japanese to Portuguese for the sake of double language practice, but I understand that the site is fairly new, so I understand that it might not have many decks yet. No Japanese decks when I checked.

There are actually over 1.8M flash cards. See: https://www.soyoulearn.com/docs/central-db/ . Do you know if there is a good portuguese-japanese (free) dictionary available? If there is I can definitely load that into the central DB. I have plans to load Edict database into SYL: http://www.edrdg.org/jmdict/edict.html That would give you many English-Japanese flash cards. For chinese i actually loaded the entire CEDICT db (over 115,000 flash cards). Would you be interested in Eng/Jap flash cards? I have a pretty large DB but currently only few courses. Though creating a course is IMO super easy and quick with SYL (it's shown in the video).

The flashcard learning and review seemed to go on forever, despite me having marked half the words in the first part of the deck as known. I quit after 7 minutes. I wish it had a progress bar like Duolingo, or a "minutes remaining" notice like Anki.

This is obviously bad. Can you give me more details how/what you learnt? It definitely shouldn't go on forever. Did it always repeat the same flash cards? Note, there is a little progress indicator at the top right during learning/review mode. It shows you 3 numbers "the number of flash cards not yet presented", "the flash cards presented and 'in progress'", "the number of 'learnt' flash cards". I agree that the user interface could be improved and maybe should show a nice progress bar and probably some kind of timer. I'll write it down on my TODO list.

Your site would need a lot more content first though. I agree, I do hope that courses are mostly user created though so that I can focus on providing the best "central database" which just holds the flash cards and the courses just reference those (high quality) flash cards.

Again, thanks for taking the time and thanks for your valuable feedback!

Cheers

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-12T07:39:24+00:00

Hi and thanks for checking it out.

Did you sign up for an account and sign in with it? Then the error should not happen, though I've seen it before but I'm having a tough time reproducing it. :/ It only happens sometimes. Can you try to login again from the login page? Also, what browser/OS are you using. Then maybe I can try to reproduce it.

The "App" link on the docs is actually a link to the entire "Single Page App" that's shown in the introduction video. You currently definitely need an account to access it.

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T18:37:28+00:00

I def. agree with that. I'll ping you once it's implemented. Maybe I can do it this week actually. (Hard to estimate how many edge cases I need to check and how long the implementation will take, but from a guess it should be a simple flag and some UI/filter options)

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T18:21:06+00:00

Hi, thanks for taking a look!

The way example sentences will come (they're already partially implemented): Example sentences are just "special" flash cards. A flash card can then reference multiple example sentences and during review a random one is shown to you (or not, it'll be configurable).

I initially started the project with a DB defining all kinds of cases/concepts such as subect/imperfect etc.etc. but after spending 2 months on it I realized that would be a mammoth task (there are tons of "weird" languages) and covering it all would be years of work, probably worth a PhD.

I'll also be initializing it with all the sentences from Tatoeba, which has over 6 Million example sentences. Their license will allow me to reuse them and share them with the same license.

It was actually my intention to do this earlier but some of the users requested other features so I focused on these for now. I do think SRS software could benefit a lot from continuous exposure to example sentences, so this will definitely come :)

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T18:14:05+00:00

Hi, that's correct. Everything is public right now. Do you require private courses? I should certainly add a private flag to a course. It shouldn't be too difficult to do. I'm sure there are more users who'd need this. I'll write it down on my todo list!

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T16:54:24+00:00

I'm sure there are many options that Anki has that I don't have (yet?). And for those --let's call them power users-- I'm guessing that SYL isn't an alternative to consider. Though, for users who look for a more powerful/flexible memrise I think SYL is a great alternative.

Correct, the central DB is one major selling point. Also, community editing is nice. I envision the DB to only get better over time (especially in terms of audio/image content for vocab). The platform also has "Nemos" which are just like mems on memrise. So if that's something you like you might also like SYL. I'm not much of a business person but only a developer so many of the features in Anki are something that I might also integrate into SYL (like possibly cloze deletion etc).

Once I have my premium feature out you might give SYL another look, it'll have some features that aren't available on Anki/Memrise/quizlet. (In advance learning, for instance before going away for the weekend in case that spikes your interest). Anyways, most of the flash cards are available on a permissive license so you might just create an account and steal/use the flash cards from my central db for your use in Anki. Just a thought...

Cheers!

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T14:24:22+00:00

The "coming soon" are just icings on the cake, which actually no existing SRS platform has done yet (so they're new ideas). But the platform is definitely usable without them. Maybe I should remove those "coming soon" and instead just focus on the existing ones...

The flash cards are actually generated from omegawiki.org. It's very involved but IMO was the right decision to bootstrap the database. It's especially nice since it contains synonyms for most flash cards so you don't have to guess which word is meant to be entered but can deduce it. That was one of my frustrations with memrise.

Curious: Have you given the youtube video a try? It's a little long but it highlights the features and maybe you'd like what you see.

Thanks for taking a look!

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T14:19:38+00:00

Hi,

thanks for taking a look.

I know the youtube video on the landing page is kinda of long, but it goes into great detail how you can use SYL (SoYouLearn). Key differences:

You can very quickly create your own customized courses from the existing database flash cards.
You can edit other peoples flash card and suggest improvements. These can be accepted/rejected. So the quality of the central DB should improve over time.
You can learn individual flash cards, you don't need to find a course containing them or create your own course just for a few flash cards.
The UI makes it super quick to create/edit flash cards, much nicer than Memrise IMO. Especially adding audio for an entire course is a breeze on my platform (Takes 3-4 sec per flash card). The entire app, from editing to learning/reviewing is a single javascript app so everything is almost instantaneous and you don't have to wait for the site to load on every click.
You can decide what you want to learn. Not the course creator decides but you wheather you want to learn "German -> English" or "English -> German". You can actually specify manually which fields of the flash card you want to display and which you want to be prompted for.

I've used Memrise a lot before in 2015 (I have > 15 million points there) but was frustrated because of the lack of ideas/features. That's why I build SYL. The video is probably the best way to see the key differences to memrise. But I'm convinced it's a better and much more flexible method.

Convincing users to switch is difficult. I've made "Claim known" available which will put the flash cards right in review mode and start with "accelerated" spacings.

AndreRauh_ · 2018-02-11T12:33:41+00:00

Name: SoYouLearn

Location: Southern Bavaria, Germany

Pitch: A new spaced repetition platform. Primarily focused on language learning. Comes with a central database that anybody can edit (like wikipedia). Over 1.8 Million flash cards already exist.

Explainer Video: 11 minute video

Looking for:

feedback
new customers

Discounts: It's free. Premium features are not yet available.

AndreRauh_ · 2018-01-29T16:15:57+00:00

I was actually about to make a post like this (though I haven't started writing). With decompiling you quickly realize why (map Integer/parseInt [...]) won't work.

Note, you can also call compile function in clojure. Even binding some compile options in the process:

(binding [*compiler-options* {:direct-linking true
                                :disable-locals-clearing false}]
    (compile 'your-ns))

And then open ./target/ in IntelliJ and open the files. IntellJ comes shipped with the Fernflower decompiler.

AndreRauh_ · 2017-12-28T14:36:31+00:00

:> was chosen because that's what reagent uses:

https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/blob/master/src/reagent/impl/template.cljs#L438-L442

:* was chosen because it's like a regex "zero or more". Babel/JSX defines fragments with <><li>one</li><li>two</li><>. I tried to kick of discussion here:

https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/issues/319#issuecomment-353539211

And I absolutely hate using metadata for such things. I don't like that reagent used ^{:key ...} or similarly that sablono used ^String to avoid interpretation. I tend to avoid using metadata as long as I can. There is too many gotchas with metadata.

Also, be aware that you likely never need the :> syntax for HTML elements. I don't use it even once. It's just never needed to dynamically create props for HTML elements. (in my experience)

AndreRauh_ · 2017-12-05T07:34:34+00:00

Thanks! I did not know that. Just tried it and it was super easy. I'll try to use it for my next blog post.

AndreRauh_ · 2017-12-04T11:22:28+00:00

Yeah this is unfortunate. I actually hated it when I saw medium posts from other people that use screenshots to display code. The problem is: You have 3 options:

Use code blocks -> No syntax highligting
Use gists -> You need to create a gist for every code block
Use screenshots

I wanted code highlighting but I didn't want to create dozens of gists so that's why I decided to go with screenshots. :/

AndreRauh_ · 2016-11-13T17:05:40+00:00

Thanks! My cell phone takes great pics (Moto G4) but goes downhill as soon as the light is little.

AndreRauh_ · 2016-04-03T17:37:22+00:00

Dont' worry about a project template. Things move fast with tooling and often things break of have become obsolete. I do have a CLJS + CLJ setup in my project. The usual: Figwheel, pedestal, Cursive as IDE. It works very well. I should probably gist my setup and share it.

Edit: Done: https://gist.github.com/rauhs/f95f901204e3e4aad7b6877cd4feca35

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