As someone who is both an avid language learner and a software developer - what’s the value added in this platform, for someone who is already pretty comfortable as a programmer and autodidact?
It would take a lot to convince me to pay that much for a product like this. True, it can be inconvenient trolling around for content in your target language, but as a software dev I am pretty experienced with finding obscure things on the internet by finessing search queries. And there are plenty of other apps out there that do spaced repetition for you, and open source tools and data sets that can be used to help you scrape/process vocab (again, if you don’t mind spending some time debugging, which I personally do not). Besides that, I really don’t find it that inconvenient to manually write down words/phrases from books or movies and copy them into my SR deck. On the contrary, I think this overhead actually helps the phrases stick better!
So how would you sell your site to someone in my situation? What would I get out of it?
I would have to know more about your circumstances before I could make genuine recommendations. But as an autodidactal programmer, I can serve as somewhat of an authority on this manner ;) The value I get out of the platform is:
1. I can study all my languages on the same platform. For my, having studied 30+ languages (note: not claiming to speak them), I just want to “do my languages”. I can study dialectal Arabic, minority languages, archaic languages, and the major languages, all in a nice consistent and (if I can say so myself) beautiful UI.
2. Everything is heavily annotated with all the information you could ever need. This means that I add flashcards, and when I’m learning them, I have the gender, cases, tenses, agglutination, phonetics, translations, audio, conjugation/declention tables, character breakdowns, mutations, idioms, multilword expressions, roots, etymology, etc etc (the list really does go on) at my fingertips. This means I just go through my flashcards, and when I have a question, I get an answer. If I have more questions, I have a context aware chat integrated. For me, this is the autodidactal dream come true.
3. Personally, I really love SRS. I also really hate SRS. If I have to study the words “dog”, “walk”, & “morning” - and I have a sentence “I walk my dog in the morning”, I just want to study that one one sentence and be done with it. Also, I really want to just be able to play audio sentences and listen to them while cooking/cleaning/walking my dog. Or do a free recall sessions, write down everything I remember from yesterday, and skip those reviews today (it’s more effective than SRS anyways).
Lastly, WRT to creating your own flashcards: You can still create flashcards manually on Phrasing - I agree the act of creating flashcards is beneficial, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone - but I’m not sure I buy it’s the highest leverage way for one to spend their time. At least for me, it definitely is not. I would rather skip that (admittedly beneficial) step, and move onto the next step. YMMV
It’s really hard to narrow the list down to three, I have a hundred things I want to say, but I’ll leave it here. Due to popular demand, I recorded a few live demos today so you can see it in action:
It would take a lot to convince me to pay that much for a product like this. True, it can be inconvenient trolling around for content in your target language, but as a software dev I am pretty experienced with finding obscure things on the internet by finessing search queries. And there are plenty of other apps out there that do spaced repetition for you, and open source tools and data sets that can be used to help you scrape/process vocab (again, if you don’t mind spending some time debugging, which I personally do not). Besides that, I really don’t find it that inconvenient to manually write down words/phrases from books or movies and copy them into my SR deck. On the contrary, I think this overhead actually helps the phrases stick better!
So how would you sell your site to someone in my situation? What would I get out of it?