(10,000 users of learn10 beta)
We have made some amendments to the learn10 website over recent days, and in the background, we’ve been working on the next release of learn10 - one that incorporates a speaking avatar who will read out your word list, as well as a payment system. We have to charge for the sound because we are charged each time the speaking avatar is played. The sound will only be available on verified languages, so we will be adding English & Spanish sound first, with others to follow soon.
We are really close to having the new word lists for Arabic, German and Japanese uploaded into the learnit widget. We just need to tweak the widget slightly first. All three languages will included grammatical info (which will pop up if you hover over the text - like with Spanish) and our Japanese translator has included Romaji (westernised pronunciation) as well as Kanji, Hiragana & Katakana. It’s really exciting that we will soon be able to offer this additional content. As soon as we have some income from the sound, we will be able to add verified translations & pronunciations to other languages.
Another exciting development is the discovery of MyVox. This is an ad supported service where you can use an ordinary phone to record sounds for a web site. We could use this service so that learnit users can record their daily word lists for free. Over time this will build a library of pronunciation sounds for each word in many different languages, including endangered languages that would never make it onto commercial systems.
We would like to build in some social features into our myvox system, so that, for example, other learners can vote on which is the best pronunciation of a word. I can’t wait to give it a go - I wonder if native speakers will be prepared to spend some time recording words for learners of their language, for example. Hmm, maybe I should create a poll about it.
