It's a cool looking site, but these terminal style sites (seen a few of them from web developers and software types) look terrible on phones and tablets (keyboard constantly present), which is well over 60% of web traffic now.
You have to keep in mind your audience. If you presume everybody visiting this site is software-inclined, it's fine. I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.
I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.
That reminds me of the time my friend and I put together a silly shell script called pentagonhack.sh that went through an 80s-movie-style nonsense hacking sequence while you mashed the keys. Most of the content was inside jokes, but there were a number of all caps references to a Pentagon server with warnings about unauthorized access being forbidden, and overall it looked pretty plausible to someone with no technical background or even cursory knowledge of SSH and Bash.
Anyway, my friend got bored one day and fired up the script in a TTY on his laptop during lunch in our high school cafeteria. Apparently his friend who'd been sitting nearby noticed and started paying attention to what was on his screen, and then understandably found it alarming when by all appearances he was in the middle of typing out a command to run a malware executable on a Pentagon server. So she stands up and yells, "JOSH IS HACKING THE PENTAGON!". Of course he immediately switches back to X11/GNOME, probably with some homework assignment open in OpenOffice or an active Blackboard tab in Firefox, and everyone looks at his screen before looking back at her like she's crazy. The way he tells it, she was practically ready to go call the cops until he explained the joke and calmed her down.
When I returned to college ~15 years ago, my main laptop was a ThinkPad T60 running some flavor of Debian. I spent a lot of time with a full-screen terminal open in some sort of green-on-black color scheme.
On several occasions some complete stranger would interrupt me - usually with a shoulder tap - and demand to know what I was doing hacking in the library/student union/etc. Never happened in the engineering buildings, though.
A lot of the time, you aren't even learning how to translate the sentence. It's more like you've recognised basic sentence structure (in your own language) and managed to make a sentence from:
The process of making decks and the SRS features Anki provides are some of the most effective ways to learn language (particularly vocab) behind learning (grammar) from books and language exchange with a teacher/native speaker.
Duolingo is incredibly limited. If you are serious about learning a language, you should look elsewhere. Duolingo is only a good investment of money if you want to pay for a video game with minute levels of learning in the background. It's sort of like playing Sid Meirs Civilization to learn history.
It's selling a lifestyle change, and one which is "easy" and fun.
Once you're hooked in, they gamify everything to make you feel like you're doing well. There's the leaderboards, the daily streaks, the ba-ding every time you rearrange 7 word tiles into the only possible sentence that makes any sense.
Go and look at the Duolingo subreddit. When I looked a few years ago, it's just people showing off their 3000+ day streaks.
Anki is a better tool, but its not as polished. Duolingo hooks people with all the little gamified bits, the animations, and it's self-fulfilling popularity loop. Unfortunately being polished is genuinely an incredibly important feature for the majority of people.
Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game.
Translate the following into English:
jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f
Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order:
fish to day cat eat My every eat likes
Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.
Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
I don't know why but that video on the homepage (third media item from top) split me up for how rude/brash it came across.
The mans thrusting his palm out in front of the colleague, slapping the top of his alarm clock, the woman's exaggerated third person glance and swift exit.
I can only imagine it's followed by a complaint to HR or gossip, with the man on the laptop quickly becoming a hate-figure in the office.
See Catching Features (first released around 2006) for the orienteering version of this. It still has weekly competitions with up to 100 or so regulars playing.
As another commenter suggested, orienteering is great as a sport/running variation of this. Orienteers are some of the brightest and fittest people I know.
Orienteering is a fantastic sport. I've been doing it my entire life.
The orienteers I've known have been some of the brightest and fittest people I've ever met (going to Cambridge, Oxford), doing all sorts of interesting things, and are some of the best runners you can find. One of my closest orienteering friends was disappointed in running sub-2:40 in his first marathon.
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