Introducing Weekly Report Cards
Your language learning progress in your inbox. And a new autocomplete feature!
Hello!
I’ve released weekly progress report emails! Both you and your partner will receive an email on Sunday showing relevant progress and statistics over the past week. Partners can keep track of what you’re learning right from their inbox without having to open the app.
Another big feature is dictionary and translation suggestions when adding new vocabulary. Rather than trying to automatically translate words or phrases, Coupling presents a list of suggestions sourced from dictionaries and multiple translation services, including connotations and examples.
I’ve just added an opt-out setting to these newsletter emails on signup. If you’ve previously signed up with Coupling and don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at the bottom. Thanks for being subscribed!
(check out the last update: Major Updates on Coupling)
🚀 Updates on Coupling
📈 Weekly Progress Report Emails
Weekly emails in your and your partner’s inbox summarizing the past week of language learning with statistics!
Weekly reports can involve guiding partners more into your language journey by sharing your progress without them having to actively check in on you and open the app. The report gathers your last week of progress and neatly wraps it into a digest including:
New words or phrases you’ve learned
Vocabulary you may be having trouble with
Outstanding questions
Days you’ve studied and for how long
Aggregate statistics such as total study time and vocabulary learned
I find this to be useful as your partner can keep up with what you’re currently learning, and you can riff on the vocabulary in real life, outside of the app. Or perhaps they can spot red flags if they catch you learning irrelevant or incorrect vocabulary.
📚 Dictionary and Translation Suggestions
While adding vocabulary, Coupling will search and suggest dictionary and translation results that match whatever you’ve typed.
Let’s say you type “fire” into the English field. Fire could mean a literal fire, to fire a weapon, to fire an employee, to fire someone up. And there’ll often be multiple correct ways to say that in your target language.
Coupling will present you a list of those suggestions with dictionary results and direct translations. These results come with connotations and examples sentences. Then you can just click what best matches what you want to learn. And Coupling will fill it in for you!
You can also type full sentences or phrases, and you’ll get suggestions for direct translations from multiple translation services.
😐 Miscellaneous
Added welcome emails upon completing the signup. If you didn’t get a welcome email before… then welcome!
Removed challenge packs for now to focus on primary features. As explained later, I’m going to revamp the booster packs to be more curated and ensure quality of translations. Challenge packs may roll into that later
Removing support for setting your native language for now. To focus on providing consistent quality and less complexity, I’m focusing on supporting learners that know English for now. I’ve found English learners that want to learn more have enough of an English baseline to continue learning this way. Coupling should still work fine even if you are, say, a Chinese native learning English
Some of the dictionaries were offline as I transitioned to use dictionary and translation suggestions. Those dictionaries are back online now
👐 What’s Next?
🃏 Improving Booster Pack Quality
While booster packs provide good ideas on what to learn next, much of the vocabulary in booster packs are mistranslated. This, understandably, puts off learners from using the booster packs or Coupling in general.
I’m removing those translations and adding curated and verified vocabulary for booster packs. For popular languages, I’ll source verified translations from native speakers. Translations can also be crowdsourced as native partners can fill in missing booster pack translations for all of us in exchange for rewards.
Long term, I’m also looking to source from more dictionaries.
✉️ Daily Report Card Emails
Alongside weekly progress report emails, I’m looking to add a daily session report email each time you finish your daily session. This would allow partners to keep track of progress on a day-to-day basis to practice new vocabulary with you in real life as you learn it.
As with all of our emails, you can pick and choose which ones to opt out of in Settings.
🎧 Learning with Coupling Through Podcasts
On a 22 hour road trip from NOLA to Colorado, we worked on my Cantonese by listening to a podcast and my partner inputted vocabulary I didn’t know into Coupling. This worked out amazing because I could learn a word or phrase from a language teacher speaking in casual conversation with context, then I asked my partner any additional questions I had, and once the word is input into my deck, I can further reinforce in the future.
An idea I liked was to curate podcasts into Coupling, and as you listened through the podcast, words and phrases would automatically be added into your deck at the timestamps. But an idea for a later day.
Thanks for reading and supporting the project!