Show HN: How we built a TTS-powered tool for learning spelling/foreign languages
In this technical retrospective (2011), @philfreo shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
A comment about "speller". All in all, I like it, especially the clean optics along with nice animations.
1. Looking at the site from Germany, I automatically get German translations. In German, the tool "speller" is called "Buchstabierer". That seems like an overly literal translation. Not that I can come up with a better word, but it strikes me as an unprofessional-sounding choice.
As an aside, this seems to me to be a rather common problem. Many web sites (I imagine) hand a word list to a translator, who then produces the best translations he can find. But if he isn't involved in developing the software, he can't suggest changes to the software that might be necessary to adapt it to another language. I guess my point is that proper internationalization involves more than just a quick translation of a few words. Often I would prefer to be presented with the English version by default, with the choice of opting for my native language.
2. The animation that suggests a different spelling is nice. If I enter "comminciare" when asked for the Italian verb for "to begin", it strikes out the second "m", which makes sense. But not so much if a smaller part of the word was correct. Even if only one or two letters were right -- perhaps I enter "andare" instead of "camminare" -- it ought to strike through the whole thing, instead of falsely suggesting to me that I almost had the right answer.
Very cool, I did something similar when trying to learn Kinyarwanda. (only works on Chrome, click on the lessons to deactivate them) http://kinya.nyaruka.com ↗
Surprisingly similar in a lot of ways, though obviously you guys took it a lot farther. (mine was a few hours thrown in after work to help me study)
The TTS is amazingly good. One suggestion would be to easily allow the repetition of a word. At least in Kinyarwanda the pronunciation is so critical that being able to easily repeat the word really helped. Perhaps the TTS isn't quite good enough for that though.
But really nice, great work.
I don't think I've ever seen so much links to useful tools on a blog post before. Thanks!
Edit: The http://css-tricks.com/7323-box-sizing/ ↗ seems like it will come in handy.
Very cool to see what happened behind the scenes and what went into all the iterations!
Just wanted to say that my girlfriend is a third grade teacher and she loves quizlet...
@asuth and I built "Speller" -- would love to hear any feedback on it. You can try it out here:
http://quizlet.com/2139265/speller/ ↗