Tyler here with another Linguistic Weekly Recap! It’s our first post of March, so to celebrate we’re launching a pretty big feature we’ve been working on for awhile.
Let’s get to it! 🥳
🔮 Your own magic tutor
One of the most challenging aspects of learning a new language is understanding its many nuances. Language learners typically hire teachers or tutors (who are often native speakers themselves) to help drill into the discrepancies of their target language’s grammar and best practices. However, private tutors are expensive and teachers – at least the ones teaching multiple students at once – aren’t always available for you to ask questions to.
Fortunately, technology has come a looong way in the past few years, so we went ahead and built your very own virtual language tutor, baked right into Linguistic. We’re calling it Language Genie, and just launched the beta of it this week 🚀
With Language Genie, you can have immediate access to an all-knowing chatbot, primed to chat with you about your target language. You can access Genie on any page of Linguistic and start chatting by clicking the Genie “lamp” in the bottom-right corner of your screen.
We’re super excited to have you all try it and tell us what you think! Genie is still in its early stages, and we still have quite a few adjustments to make. As of this writing, follow-up questions are not currently supported, but will be very soon.
You can read more about Language Genie and how to use it in our official announcement post here.
🧰 “Learn” & flashcard updates
We also managed to squeeze in some UX polish this week, adding in a brand new toolbar to our “Learn” feature. Now, not only can you listen to the current sentence at both normal and reduced speeds, but you can also toggle off trivial vocabulary words from the sentence’s word list! This includes words with classifications such as particles, articles, prepositions, and pronouns.
We also updated how our “Save Word” wizard works. To reduce confusion, we have modified the logic of the “Quick Save” feature (clicking the ”+” button in the word list). Instead of immediately saving the word using all of its definitions, clicking the ”+” button now opens the same wizard you would see if you clicked “Save Word” from a definition page. The last page of the wizard also now let’s you immediately begin studying the word with a bright, purple “Study Now” button (you can’t miss it).
Lastly, we replaced our “Lightning Round” / “Quick Review” button in the navigation bar with a clearer, more direct button to launch our study experience. Plus, with the new button, you’ll always be able to see exactly how many words you have slated for review.
🐛 Bug fixes & adjustments
As with every week, we also spent time hard-at-work squashing bugs and improving our overall UX. Notably, this week we fixed the following issues:
- Missing categories: There was a brief period over the past couple weeks where our “Topics” drop-down menu in our Reader contained only “Latest”. Consider it fixed!
- Mobile responsiveness: While we are still a desktop-first app, there were still some areas of our mobile experience that needed improvement, especially around saving vocabulary. We’ve tweaked it and reduced the padding around screen contents, so everything should look a bit less squished now.
Woo! We made it to the end. Good work team! We’ll see you next Friday 😊