[Release Notes] February 2022

News from the Team
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Release Notes

2022-02-XX ???

We are working on a big update that will change the saved items logic.(Should arrive in a few days, in february). It will mainly have

  • A flashcard system
  • A new saving items logic (we want to keep track of known and study words)

What we have so far

Pro users can save words and phrases. For words they save, they can choose one category (represented by the colors green, yellow, blue and red). These categories have no global meaning so each user assign his own meaning on each of the categories.
Inside the interactive subtitles and texts, words that are saved in one of the categories will be represented by the corresponding color.

What we want

For having possible some nice features we have in mind (flashcard, content difficulty estimation adapted to the user), we want to change the current saved items category system to the following systems :

  • actual categories are replaced by tags. A word can have one or many tags. In a sentence, the words that belong to one or many categories will be represented by something other than the text color (colored circle on top of the word, text underline, we didn’t decide yet) as we want to keep this text color for the following logic.
  • words belong to one of the following learning stages categories : “not saved” ; “study” ; “known”. So by default, all words will belong to the “not saved” category. By right clicking on a word, or clicking on some specific buttons in the UI, the user will be able to move words into the “study” or “known” categories.
    The words in the study category will appear in the flashcard in a “Spaced Repetition System” (thanks Ahmed for your work in Ebisu).
    Both categories “study” and “known” will be useful to find the lexical level of a user, so we can give good recommendation of which content (movie/book) will be useful for the user.

We will warn you when this will be done :slight_smile:

2022-02-07

Shared (LR extension and website)

Enhancement

We improved the full dictionary (dictionary that open when clicking on a word) in all our applications. Before the dictionary was only showing translation of a given word in the other language.
Now the dictionary also show examples of usage of the word in the target language with the translation and the audio.
These examples are organized by source, which can be :

  • Tatoeba : We use some algorithm to select from the Tatoeba database some good and varied examples. We find these examples really neat and we hope they will be useful for you
  • Current movie or text : We select from the current movie or text you are consuming some examples of the word.
  • User saved items (pro user only) : We will select from the user previously saved items some examples to help the user remember his past contacts with the word

These examples sentences are interactive too, so you can surf your target language by clicking and opening new full dictionary page recursively.

2022-01-20

Shared (LR extension and website)

Internal structure changes

  • For supporting the future features that we want to release (sentence examples of a word in the full dictionary, flashcard system, etc), we changed our database technology. We now use PortgeSQL for storing users saved items.

Side note : This update took us a lot of time to do, as changing completely the database technology and structure is something that need a lot of attention. We absolutely didn’t want to mess with the user saved items an experience. Everything went nicely and we saw a big improvement in the querying time as well as the speed of the development for the developers. Thank you for your patience :slight_smile:

2021-08-31

Language Reactor Extension (Chrome) - 5.0.0

Structural changes

  • This release merged the previously Language Learning with Netflix and Language Learning with Youtube Beta into a single extension : Language Reactor. The reason behind this is that we released at the same time a new web application Language Reactor with the goal of having extra features (Text mode, flashcards, see my saved items, more info below) that can’t be inserted in the current extension. Also, because we are going out of the scope of improving subtitles for Youtube and Netflix, we needed to get a new brand name.

Language Reactor Website

Official Release

Features

  • TurtleTube : Playlists of videos (sorted by languages AND ranked by difficulty) where you can find bilingual interactives subtitles in the same way as you can find in the Language Reactor chrome extension (for YT and NF).
    Target : Intermediate and Advance
  • Text mode : You can paste any text to get a bilingual and interactive representation of it. If the extension is enabled, you can from any website right click on the page and transfer the text of the page directly in this app.
  • View my saved item (pro user only): panel to browse and see your saved items.
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