January updates: classroom, streaks, comments & more

Etiene Dalcol, January 24, 2024

This newsletter’s topics:

🆕 Version 2.3 is out!

Click here to download / upgrade. What’s new since Polygloss 2.2:

Classrooms





The “friends” tab has been renamed to “community”. In the community tab, you can still see the people you’re following and your followers, as well as the new classroom tab.
When you join a classroom, you can see your classmates’ matches in a timeline fashion. You'll be able to interact with their posts such as bookmarking and awarding, and leave comments or corrections.


By default, when you submit a text or audio match in Polygloss, they are public. This means they can be seen by your classmates, and the text can show up in examples, or mini-games (which means you can get corrections, awards and feedback later on outside of the match). You can now adjust this in Settings > Match Audience.


Anybody can join a classroom, but only people who subscribe to Polygloss Unlimited can create one. To join a classroom, an admin of a classroom needs to send you an invitation link.
If you're a teacher, this will allow you to see what each student is posting and correct all their material. There is a special plan available for teachers, which will grant every member of the classroom with a Polygloss Unlimited subscription and let them have as many members in a classroom as desired.

Register your interest here, email us at etiene@polygloss.app, or book a chat on my calendly if you’d like to learn more and test this feature with your students.

Feedback Comments

Corrections are now split into a correction section and an optional explanation section. The input form is now also a dedicated screen section instead of a small popup.


The feedback screen has been updated to allow more interactions with the original post. It also allows more than one correction, leaving other pertinent comments and feedback, and responding to a correction if you want to clarify something. This function is also useful if you want to add a note to your own texts.


Streaks + vacation mode

After many requests to add this feature and much consideration, I decided to finally add streaks to Polygloss! If you want you can disable it in the Settings. It's not possible to pay to recover a broken streak but Polygloss Unlimited subscribers have the option to turn on “Vacation Mode” which will retain your streak until you turn it off.


Zoom image with long press



Another very requested feature is new lessons with more interesting and complex images. In the previous UI this was not possible because the images were just way too tiny to be useful. Now, the image selection allows for some images to be better displayed. By pressing it for a long time, you can also see it in Full Screen mode. The new lessons aren't there yet, but expect them any time soon. I'm really excited for our language learning app to become a bit more Dixit-esque 🎉

More updates
📢 Share a (public) match to social media.
🔉 Minutes of audio recorded now shows on your profile.
ℹ️ New “about” screen.
😀 Moved profile editing, including language changes, to the inside of your profile screen.
🐞 Bug fixes, optimizations and UI improvements.

Discord server

Polygloss now has a Discord server for us to discuss the app and language learning in general.

[Article] Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands

https://www.hackingchinese.com/analyse-and-balance-your-chinese-learning-with-paul-nations-four-strands/

The Four Strands model for language learning breaks learning into 4 equal parts: 1. Meaning-focused input, 2. Meaning-focused output 3. Language-focused learning, 4. Fluency development. While this article is written from a Chinese learning perspective, they describe this model in detail and it can be applied to any language.

[Video] The Most Mysterious Medieval Manuscript we STILL Can’t Decipher…

[Event] Polyglot Gathering 2024

https://www.polyglotgathering.com/2024/en/

Online: February 29 to March 3, 2024.

Prague, Czech Republic: May 15 to May 19, 2024.

[Album] Turkish Psychedelic Music

Mentions

[Italian] [Web & Apps Magazine] Polygloss | impara ed espandi il tuo vocabolario delle lingue straniere

Polygloss statistics

In the last month, 442 Polygloss language learners posted 8,074 short texts in 49 languages

Get Polygloss Unlimited

Features:

🎁 Everything from the free Polygloss version: play an image guessing game to practice languages, get points and unlock topics

⚡️ Unlimited energy points to use on translations, reviewing, saving a text to your library and more

📢 Listen button and special listening exercises (supports 40+ languages)

🎤 Audio recording (send and receive audio messages during matches)

👑 A special VIP crown on your username

Click here to see the full breakdown between free and paid features.

Pricing:

We have a pay-what-you-can scheme with different tiers of pricing according to your affordability adjusted per country / region. There is no difference in the subscription features between these tiers. There are monthly, yearly, and lifetime plan. The possibility to buy a lifetime subscription is not going to be unlocked to all players forever, so get yours while you can!

What did you think of these updates? Drop a comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts 👇

Etiene is a Software Engineer who is passionate about languages. She recently finished her MSc. in Computer Science researching Computational Linguistics and Computer Assisted Language Learning.