Hello! Coupling is ready to try to learn (or coach) your partner’s language! I can set you up either over video, voice, or text. Just a quick chat to learn more about your language learning journey.
Thanks to everyone that signed up and is trying it out now!
And onto this week’s development updates!
🤿 Hide Yo Vocab
Very often, you want to surprise your partner by pulling some freshly-minted vocab out of your butt. But your partner can see all the vocab you are learning. So I’ve added a Hide Vocabulary button to be able to hide whatever vocab you want.
🌐 Expanded Language Support for Booster Packs
Coupling supports almost every major language (and later will have better support for rare languages or dialects). Booster packs are built-in packs of vocabulary for common categories and situations, that you can add to your vocabulary deck in one tap. Previously, only language pairs involving English was supported. Now booster packs support any language to any language (e.g., Chinese to and from Polish).
🗺️ Better Support for Non-Native English Learners
I added a few quality of life improvements for couples that share English as a common language, but do not know each other’s native language (for example, a Spanish-Chinese couple that use English in between).
It could be difficult for the coaching partner to guide their partner if the vocabulary cards were for example, German to Chinese. Without knowing German, it’d be difficult for the coaching partner to tell if the Chinese was correct. Now English is shown alongside as an intermediary language to help the coaching partner judge the quality of the translation and make modifications or add notes.
Partners can now also view each other’s booster packs. But I still need to show English as an intermediary language on booster packs, and add a flag option to mark down bad translations.
📨 Signup Improvements
When signing up and inviting your partner, your partner will get an email notification to join. Now when your partner uses that invite link, they will automatically be paired with you after signing up.
You will also receive in-app notifications when you receive an invite or your invite has been accepted. There have also been a few bug fixes with the login and signup flow.
📚 Imported Dictionaries
We’re continuing to import dozens of dictionaries into our database, containing millions of entries. Coupling uses dictionaries to generate breakdowns of phrases to their individual words and their meanings.
What’s Next?
Here’s what I’m working on next week!
📰 Over Ten Million Sentences
Currently in Coupling, you and your partner can add sentences for each vocabularly. I’ve imported over ten million sentences to display as built-in examples as you are learning new vocabulary. These sentences will become available in the app next week.
🔔 Notifications (Optional)
It’s easy to forget about this language learning app you signed up for, and sometimes you need a bit of a kick to get learning.
I’ll add optional email (and later opt-in SMS) notifications to get notified when your partner communicates with you in the app (asked or answered a question, added vocabulary for you, poked you to complete your daily studies). These can be instant, or a weekly digest. You can also opt-in to get notified when you are falling behind on your studies.
🎁 More Booster Packs
I’ll continue to add booster pack categories containing hundreds of more vocabulary! Some relevant ones might be talking to your partner’s family, or perhaps we had a request for bedroom-related ones.
📊 Vocabulary Frequencies
I’d like to import data on pieces of vocabulary, how frequently they are used in real life. This would be helpful to learn how relatively important each piece of vocabulary is. I have some data from corpuses of movies and TV shows. For Chinese, specifically, I can display HSK levels as well!
🎮 More Interactive Language Games
After I get all of those settled, I’ll work on building language games. For example, Guess Who? where you each choose one of a few dozen pictures of characters, and need to ask and answer each other’s questions in your target language to narrow down what character your partner chose. First one to guess the character wins!
Join the Discord and Try Out!
My goal is to create something that can actually be useful for you to learn a language and grow closer to your partner and have fun. I’d love to hear your thoughts!