November Updates: sentence examples, new points screen & more

Etiene Dalcol, November 23, 2022

This newsletter’s topics:

Version 1.2 is out for Android and iOS!

Click here to upgrade! What’s new:

🫣 Sentence examples for all languages when word hints are not available

Some languages in Polygloss have word hints that you can unlock during a match. The words are usually shown in three categories: the first word is a verb, the second is a noun, and the last one belongs to some other category, like adjectives or adverbs. And they are tailored for you: Polygloss looks at your past matches and prioritises showing you words that you haven’t used yet. If you don’t know what to write, this helps you have enough components to form a sentence and can teach you something new.

Processing the word hints is quite a lot of work, as you can see in the graph below. If you want to know more about the details of this process, check our blog post “Transforming user-generated content into writing hints in Polygloss”. It includes explanations about various concepts in Computational Linguistics, with code examples in Python.

https://polygloss.app/posts/transforming-user-generated-content-into-writing-hints/

But what happens when I add a new lesson with new images? What if there aren’t language processing tools for me to work with a specific language? Or if learners are using a language for which I didn’t have a lot of data or for which I haven’t done this process yet? In those cases, word hints are usually not available. Hence, in v1.2 we added sentence examples to Polygloss:

In Catalan: Do you want to dance? Of course I do!
In Catalan: Do you want to dance? Of course I do!

As soon as someone writes about any image in_ any language_, that information can be useful to someone else. If you feel a bit stuck, you can unlock the examples as originally written by other players during a match. We use different criteria for choosing the best examples to show you, but you can fetch a different one or report the example should anything go wrong. More details about it can also be found at the blog post.

🖼 New points screen looks, plus match summary and button to play again with the same player

header

🖼 5 new lessons: Places - Space, Health - Hospital, Daily Routine - Breakfast, Advanced - Survival, and Places - Bakery

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Polygloss (@polyglossapp)

Other updates:

📢 Share button to tell your friends and communities about Polygloss
👋 Language-specific news → more on that in the next newsletter *
❌ Dismiss button on bottom pop up message *
🏆 More player awards options
♿️ Fixed several accessibility bugs related to font size
✨ Improvements to partner-matching algorithm
🐞 Fixed error with rendering punctuation in right-to-left languages
🐞 Fixed karma and stars sometimes not saving for some players
🐞 Fixed language dropdown not saving chosen language
🐞 Fixed bug with automatic reclaiming of inactive matches
🐞 Fixed bug causing some players to not be able to start a match
🐞 Fixed bug stopping some players from opening corrections
🐞 Fixed bug with image caching
🐞 Fixed screen refresh bug when editing profile languages
🐞 Fixed several typos *
👩‍💻 Big codebase upgrade

*Special thanks to

Angel Hudgins, who got their first PRs merged to the Polygloss codebase!

Plans for next Polygloss versions

We just finished making the plans for what we want to implement in the next few app versions. What do you think? Let us know in the comments 🤗

♻️ Quick Play / review / correct outside of match - Next
🔤 Reprocess word hints and add hints for more languages, including Welsh - In progress
🙈 Allow editing match after sending
🥇 Allow rewarding match partner after choosing their image
😎 Player profile screen
🐞 Investigate app getting stuck if backgrounded

Best feedbacks and shout-outs

Every time we send a newsletter, we will pick the player who gave us the best feedback or shout-out in social media and send them a surprise prize! 🎁 Tag us on twitter, IG, tiktok or facebook to participate. The winner this month is @AdaraAstin!

Polygloss statistics

Highlights

Supporting Polygloss

👯‍♀️ Share Polygloss with your friends

Polygloss is a collaborative game, the more people play, the better the learning experience. Inviting other folks and helping us grow our community is the best way to support us! Tell them what you think of the app send them the link to our website: https://polygloss.app

Other ways to support Polygloss:

Latest from our blog

There’s no such a thing as neutral Spanish, by Tamara Mathov

https://polygloss.app/posts/theres-no-such-thing-as-neutral-spanish/

“Several times, I’ve encountered a student telling me “I want to learn Neutral Spanish”, and I usually give the same response: “I can’t help you learn something that doesn’t exist”. So what does dialect mean? And what’s the difference between some common Spanish dialects? Find more here.

https://lindiebotes.com/2022/10/12/9-quick-tips-to-find-resources-for-lesser-learned-languages/

[Lindie Botes] 9 quick tips to find resources for lesser-learned languages

https://languageloversau.podbean.com/e/ep-066-make-language-learning-fun-again/

[Language Chats Podcast] Make language learning fun again

[The Language Learning Hub] 4 Incredible Apps Not Made For Learning Languages But Definitely Worth Using

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

PS.: Our past newsletters might have ended up in your spam box accidentally due to a misconfiguration on my part. If you don’t want to miss the past updates, have a second look there. While you are there, it would be super helpful if you could mark us as ‘not spam’ too.

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.