Introducing Moments in Coupling
🎮 Interactive language learning games with your partner
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🚀 I’m excited to introduce Moments in Coupling! Moments are fun mini-games for you and your partner to play together to improve your language skills.
For the longest time, I shied away from relying on your native speaking partners too much, and focused on the learner side. After talking with people, I re-realized the forgotten mission, to learn languages together through memorable activities and coupled energy. Read on!
🚀 Updates on Coupling
🤗 Moments (Beta)
Coupling goes multiplayer — Moments are fun and interactive mini-games between the learner and native speaking partner. You’ll get speaking practice, learn new words and phrases, and a chance to show off what you’ve been studying daily. The goal of each Moment is to learn ten new words or phrases.
You each get on your device to play a multiplayer game that I’ve built which will require communication. For immersion, try to speak and listen using the target language throughout the game.
The pilot game is a version of the classic tabletop game, Guess Who? There are 24 characters with varying visual characteristics like color, clothes, and expressions. Each of you secretly choose one of the characters. The goal is to guess which character the other chose through yes-or-no questions, with the slight twist here being all questions and answers must be done in the target language and no repeat questions.
When you don’t know how to say a word or phrase, your partner can add vocabulary for you in real-time from their device. But Moments also provide tools for you on your device to request new vocabulary in real-time, from your partner.
Once you and your partner work together to learn ten new vocabulary, the Moment is successfully minted and available to look back upon later in the Past Moments section. You’ll be able to play again whenever you want, browse the vocabulary was added, and see how long you spent in that Moment.
Vocabulary that gets added via Moments get dropped into your learning queue. Hopefully, it’s easier to learn those new words when they’re reinforced by a memorable Moment.
After you complete a Moment, you should get a new one the next day. Right now, I’m launching with just one pilot game (Guess Who?). That has some replay value until I release the next game.
I slapped a beta tag on Moments because bugs, probably.
🗄️ Vocabulary Search and Sort
You can now search and sort your vocabulary by newly added, last reviewed, learning progress, or alphabetical in both your target language and English. Look up a vocabulary, see what your partner has recently been learning, or browse from top to bottom what words you know the best!
🔀 Language Switcher
If you’re learning multiple languages at once, you can now quickly switch between what language you are learning. Previously, you had to go into the settings to do so. Now just tap the dropdown by your name at the top. I’m learning Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish myself currently!
🎧 Podcast Packs
For Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese, I’ve added some podcast packs.
I used to listen to podcasts to improve my language skills, but found I had very poor retention rate just by listening. I could add the vocabulary to my deck, but it’s hard to transfer them from audio especially if I’m commuting. I wanted a way to listen to podcasts and have all the vocabulary they teach imported to my deck.
I’ve listened to a few dozen language learning podcast episodes and curated the vocabulary they introduce. You can listen to the podcast episodes and add new words and phrases with one-click as they introduce them.
Not only do you get new vocabulary, but a whole lot of context around them as professional language tutors teach you about them. For now, for the languages I’ve done them for at least, it’s a good introduction to the language if you’re a beginner.
Let me know if you find these useful or want to try them in your target language, and I can pump out more.
🔥 New Streaks
Streaks are now cuppier. Don’t make them sad. The calendar streak view will return at a future date when advanced statistics are introduced.
I plan on rewarding you with stacked cups on days where you both complete your daily learn and create a moment.
🌌 Lofi Study Mode
While doing your daily learn, there’s a speaker icon on the bottom right. Click if you want some background lofi study music to accompany your learning session.
📰 Updates on Booster Packs
Booster packs have been demoted for now and are now only shown for languages that I have sourced all of the vocabulary (Cantonese, Chinese, and French). Let me know if you or your partner would like to help contribute to booster packs for other languages. The app generates translations so mostly, you just have to choose the best suggestion from the list for a given word or phrase.
👐 What’s Next?
🎲 More Mini-Games
I’ve built one mini-game thus far. Most of the time was spent building the foundations of Moments and the multiplayer network. The factory will begin churning out more mini-games.
I’m fond of building versions of Crazy Taxi and Overcooked. I have a whole page of game ideas to build.
💰 Pledge Challenge
I’ve had a few people take a pledge challenge. I hold onto your $15 or $30 for a month, and I’ll give you back $0.50 or $1 for each day you complete your daily learn. If you learn every day, then you get all your money back!
This provides mutual benefits: financial incentive for you to learn, and some small support to the project in case you skipped a day or two.
In the future for people who take the pledge, I plan on having this tied to additional extra features. Let me know if you’re interested in trying this out!
🎶 Song Packs
Like podcast packs, but from popular songs instead of educational podcasts. Disney has a lot of these for each language! Song lyrics are a good way to learn full sentences and how the cool kids are speaking the language these days.
I’ve been learning some Cantonese through Jackie Chan’s epic rendition of “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Disney’s Mulan.
☕ Memory Handles
It’s extremely helpful when trying to memorize a word to create a mnemonic. A memory handle that records how you plan on remembering the word. It could be an image, a story, or relation to another word you know (either in English or the target language).
I hope to add a feature to the flashcards where you can create a memory handle to help you remember how you’ll remember a vocabulary. For example, a stock image with a caption, word maps, a jingle (especially if from a song pack), or a drawing.
And cups have handles too. Clever, eh?
🙏 Try out Moments. Please let me know of any bugs or suggestions. Thanks for reading and supporting the project!
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