New Vocabulary Starter Decks + Anki Importer

Now featuring starter decks for 50+ languages with 200+ essential words and phrases

Big updates this week! If you haven’t signed up yet, click below to try Coupling and start learning with your partner.

(check out the last update)

⬆️ Updates on Coupling

🎴 Curated Starter Decks for 50+ Languages

Coupling currently supports 100+ languages. Now for most languages, you have the option to begin your language learning with a curated beginner vocabulary deck, featuring 200 beginner essential words and phrases.

Curated starter decks with 200+ essential vocabulary for 50+ languages, courtesy of Xefjord and community

If you are already using the app, you can go to the Booster Packs section to browse and add words from the starter deck.

Upon signing up, you’ll automatically get bootstrapped with the starter deck, if you want

These starter decks are made possible by the hard work from Xefjord’s Complete Language Learning Series and their community of volunteers!

📦 Import Anki Decks

Anki is a spaced repetition flashcard program popular with language learners and medical students. There are tons of free vocabulary flashcard decks created by the thriving community of language learners.

Now in Coupling, you can import Anki decks! Grab your existing deck or download ones online (as an .apkg file). Many decks have thousands of vocabulary. That might be a lot to import at once. With new optimizations, Coupling is now tested to work with tens of thousands of vocabulary.

Anki Importer. Set what fields are relevant, pick and choose vocabulary, have duplicates automatically removed, and go!

You can also pick and choose what vocabulary you want to import rather than importing a whole deck. And Coupling’s Anki importer will detect what vocabulary is already in your deck and not import duplicates. I’ve even tested on importing 10,000 Chinese and Spanish words at once!

Vocabulary that you or your partner add manually takes precedence over vocabulary imported from an Anki deck in what goes into your learning queue first. So if you do import a large Anki deck, it’ll effectively act a a filler backlog.

The Anki Importer (Beta) can be found in your settings underneath Language.

📮 Password Reset and Change Email

In case you forgot your password or accidentally signed up with a work email or something, you can now reset your password (from the login screen) or change your email (from your user profile).

😐 Miscellaneous

• A lot of UI and UX fixes, as well as making streaks and goals more reliable.

• Better handling of extremely large vocabulary decks. The vocabulary listing page is now an infinite scroll. Support for search and filtering will come later on.

• You can now attach questions and audio recordings while adding new vocabulary.

• The default limit of new cards per day to learn has been reduced from 10 to 5. At 10 new cards per day, the study queue quickly built up! 5 should be more manageable for most of us, and it can be increased in your settings.

• Added ability to delete notes on flashcards

• Improved support for English learners, can now add definitions in English alongside the native language translation

👐 What’s Next?

My primary goal has shifted to two things to try to make the app more useful to everyone:

• 🏃‍♀️ Improve the onboarding process for new users. I’ll sprinkle in tutorials, and make it more clear what to do upon starting the app (i.e., complete the first review as a learner, or how to support the learner as the guider). While there’s a good chunk of people that stick around to continue learning, I lose a good chunk of people in the first three days.

• 🧧 Introduce incentives for guiding partners. There’s a good incentive for learners to use Coupling to keep learning, but I need to work on the other side for the partners that are acting as support. This may include introducing daily goals and streaks for the partner to earn by assisting the learner, setting real life rewards (e.g., getting a cooked dinner upon adding 20 audio recordings), developing fun games (e.g., Heads Up, Guess Who?, Pictionary), or sending weekly report cards with statistics and insights on the learner’s journey.

If you have any insights on how you or your partner might benefit from any changes, please let me know! Always on the lookout for brutal feedback and for people to tell me why they think this project might fail. That allows me to take steps in the right direction.

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