This week, amongst other in-the-work features, as well as fixes for the major overhaul of our reader experience we launched last week, we launched something pretty amazing: automatically inferred levels for your content library, as well as yourself.
What does this all mean? Let’s find out.
💋 Kiss placement tests goodbye
At Linguistic, we never want users to have to waste time doing something we could be doing for them. One of the most cumbersome aspects of learning a language is trying to figure out where your level is. If you’re starting from scratch and make your way through Chinese textbooks for HSK 1 through 3, well congratulations – you’re most likely HSK 3 (assuming you remember everything).
However, learning a language is rarely that linear. People will pick up a language, forget some of it, learn a bit more, forget… and the cycle repeats. If you’re serious about diving back into a language, it’s important to know roughly where your existing skill level is at so you can study the correct materials. With Linguistic, this is now as simple as just saving ten flashcards for words you don’t know. That’s right – only ten.
We’ll use this information to gather a sense of where your skill level is at according to the global standards for each language: HSK for Chinese, JLPT for Japanese, and CEFR for English. We refresh this data every week, so the more words you save per week, the stronger a sense of your level we’ll gather!
🧠 Learn articles for your skill level
Along with proficiency analysis, we’re also rolling out difficulty analysis for every article in our library (as well as any article you import)! Every article will now contain a difficulty score at the top of the card, so you can specifically focus on articles you have the best chance of understanding. Soon we’ll offer the ability to recommend articles based on these scores, as well as provide additional options for filtering by difficulty.
That’s all for this week! See you in seven days.