Hi, thanks for subscribing to this newsletter! Again, if you’d like to try the Coupling Beta early, schedule a time and I’ll walk you through the app.
Updates on Coupling
🌺 Added Cantonese Support
I had a fellow Cantonese learner sign up, though I didn’t have support for it yet. Fortunately, it only took me an hour or so to add full support for Cantonese! Including audio recordings, Jyutping, and sentence breakdowns. Cantonese was the first language I started trying to learn, for 8 years now, so this is exciting for me.
🇮🇷🇳🇵 Fallback Audio Recordings for Farsi and Nepali
I didn’t have audio recordings for Farsi and Nepalese, so for now, I have them falling back to use the audio generators for Arabic and Hindi, since they use similar writing systems. It sort of works! Until I add ability to add your own recordings.
💬 Email Notifications (If Your Partner Did Stuff)
Get notified of notable recent partner activity that you haven’t seen. This email will go out at most once per day, only if there was partner activity that you haven’t seen. Let me know if there is anything I can do to improve this, or other ways you would like to be notified.
You can customize your email notification settings in your user settings in Coupling.
🔀 Shuffled Queue
The review queue is now shuffled by default, so you won’t be reviewing things in the same exact order every time now.
What’s Next?
More and more people have started to use Coupling and joined the Discord. I’ve been learning lots from people’s experiences and ideas on language learning. Here’s Coupling’s short-term feature roadmap (pushing out some of the roadmap features I had on the last update):
🎙️ Audio Recordings From You and Your Partner
Finding good audio recordings from native speakers is one of the tougher things in creating good vocabulary flashcards. Since we are native speakers or having native speaking partners that are willing to help, we have a great resource for audio recordings.
I’ll be implementing ability to add your own audio recordings for you and your partner. What better voice to listen and learn from than the voice of your partner.
📈 Graphs and Statistics
It’s crucial to be able to visualize your progress. Language learning apps with streaks are commonplace after Duolingo & Co. Someone noted they’ll study harder with streaks. So that’s on the roadmap.
Beyond streaks, I’ll add graphs, to show your vocabulary accumulated over time, rate of flashcards added, rate of reviews, future review schedule, and a graph for each individual vocabulary showing the rate of their mastery as you acquire, learn, review, and sometimes forget.
📰 Ten Million Sentences
Sentence mining is common among language learners. I’ve mined millions of community-generated sentences. I haven’t gotten around to it yet since last week, but soon, matching sentences will be shown in the sentences section of your flashcards.
A fun idea is N+1 learning through sentences. To have Coupling analyze the vocabulary you know. Then suggest sentences for you to learn, where you know most of the words, but not all of them. This is the N+1 method, take what you know, and learn a little bit more on top of it.
📧 Weekly Progress Emails
An optional digest email sent to you and your partner summarizing language learning activity for the week: number of vocabulary learned, number of vocabulary added for each other, number of reviews, days of studying skipped, etc. I think most of us language learners wouldn’t mind a nudge sometimes!
Longer term roadmap includes having a shareable profile and being able to add multiple people (friends and family) to join along.
🔨 Tip: Adding New Vocabulary From Breakdowns
In the breakdown section of flashcards (the one that takes each word in a phrase or each character in word, and shows you individual definitions), if you click the words, you’ll be led to the add form where you can add those words to your deck with a click.
Back to work!
~ kevin