I’m loving PhrasePump as it’s been really helping me develop my ear for the language, but sometimes I find myself looking at the screen searching for a button to repeat the TTS & find myself being able to see the syllable splits & color codings of the word & finally being able to understand it when I see it.
Can we obscure the text further?
Ideas:
Remove the color codings on the blurred text & put them in
Add a different type of blur (pixelated blur might work better here until I suppose we then begin to master what white space looks like in that form as well ).
Outright replace the obscured text with iconography.
I noticed that when the Practice option is used for Phrase Pump the text is obscured however hovering the mouse reveals both the native language and target language at the same time.
However, if the Quiz option is selected the English text isn’t obscured in any way at all so you see the English translation before seeing or hearing the audio/text in the target language which somewhat defeats the purpose.
I’ve worked around this by just dragging the bottom half of the window below the bottom of the screen.
Hopefully this one gets fixed soon since it would be such an easy fix (they already have the blurring text worked in the rest of the program).
It would be an interesting additional exercise to add to PhrasePump—i.e., have cards in a cloze-style/fill-in-the-blank that obscure the translated text/subtitles.
Or, as you mentioned, even blur those translations out in some versions presented to the learner.
It would make a lot more sense to blur the translations first which will allow the user more options on how to use Phrase Pump.
If the user wanted to they could hover the mouse over the English text first and it would work exactly as it does now.
However I like to use Phrase Pump in the following way:
1st: listen to the audio to see if I understood.
2nd: display the target language translation to see if I heard correctly.
3rd: Look at the English translation to see if I remember all the definitions and meaning of the phrase
I know that not everyone will necessarily work in this exact way, but letting us choose what is blurred allows a lot more flexibility in how it’s used.
edit: It looks like you’re using Phrase Pump for individual words. I tend to save the entire phrase rather than just one word so that might mean we probably use it a bit differently.
It would make a lot more sense to blur translations to allow learners more flexibility in their approach to learning with PhrasePump. Rather than leaving them visible from the start in the Quiz section of PhrasePump (seen in my original photos), the text could be blurred like in the Listening Practice section of PhrasePump.
I tend to use PhrasePump similarly—as I am a beginner just getting used to the language.
I mark words in the dual subtitles to understand sentences better. And consequently, it makes its way into PhrasePump because it’s designed that way.
Korean has a lot of different word endings, so I also mark words with similar roots or words I hear a lot since the frequency feature doesn’t work correctly for Korean yet—since it’s a bit tricky for applications like LR to figure out with all the variations. I pay attention to these more in the subtitles versus PhrasePump.
P. S. Though I can also see how the devs designed the Quiz section to have a different approach than the Listening Practice section by only blurring the Listening Practice cards and not the cards in the Quiz section.
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