Show HN: I made a word puzzles app for improving your English vocabulary
dictionarygames.ioEnglish is my second language. From my experience, I learnt that developing your vocabulary is a long and arduous process. Traditionally, learners used flashcards (or their digital incarnations). I wanted to build something more engaging and more effective in building your vocabulary.
DictionaryGames is aimed mostly at ESL (English as a Second Language) students, but I am hoping it might be fun for any English language lovers.
The project is in BETA, it is free, and no registration is required.
I am looking for feedback to improve it. If you comment, please indicate if you are a native English speaker. I am in particular interested in the feedback from ESL learners.
As someone who works in the linguistics space and has worked with numerous teams on games and has a wealth of knowledge on how people actually learn vocabulary and what they actually find fun when doing so, I feel like this game would benefit from a pause, a rethink, and a redo. I am in the middle of a Covid bout right now or I would say something more substantive but perhaps most important: you already have valuable feedback here you seem to be rejecting. Why? For example, what if you did allow multiple answers in the blank and scored accordingly?
I think your game has potential but, at present, the questions are too hard and the answers are sometimes simply wrong. Example:
Q: Find the noun matching the following definition: "A burden or responsibility."
A: Saddle
This is not correct. Saddle as a verb can mean "to burden", but as a noun it does not mean a burden.
Working on finding these issues...
> Guess the missing word to complete the following sentence:
> Everyone respects him, he's the _ _ _ _ _ in this business.
Apparently the answer is "daddy"... this is not a good question or answer. Good luck with the launch, but you might want a native speaker to audit your question bank.
This is why it's still in BETA...
Why do you make people pay yet you claim to be helpful...you know helping is not always about getting a reward in return right?
It’s free.
By its nature, this game should accept synonyms of the synonyms it is looking for. I offered “bountiful” when the game wanted “abundant.” My answer was not wrong. When it was rejected I instantly lost interest (i.e. motivation, will, desire) to play the game.
The puzzle is about finding a specific (one) word for each game/question. In your case abundant was the answer. The cursor indicates correct/incorrect word before it is submitted preventing you from giving a good answer - bountiful - which is NOT the solution to this specific puzzle. It's designed to push the students to find alternatives, i.e. yet another word that can be a solution until they find the correct one. In other words it does not accept multiple solutions by design.
Hmm, weird questions
"Question: Find the word matching the following definition: Extremely or very much."
My Attempt: "sufficient"
Actual answer: "jolly"
huh??
The data comes from various open source, academic, etc databases. If you look up Oxford dictionary you will find for example: adverb INFORMAL•BRITISH very; extremely. "he is jolly busy"
Oh ok maybe that’s why it didn’t make sense to me, it’s a British colloquialism I’m not familiar with as an American.
Designing an ESL learning app for the global village is a challenge.
Speaking as a native English speaker from London: I can assure you that most Brits would get this question wrong. It is true that Brits use "jolly" to mean "very" but it is, as you've noted, informal. Brits do not use it this way in formal speech. You would have to make it clear in the question that you were talking about informal English. E.G. "Name a word that means 'happy' and can also informally mean 'very'".
Note that the question is never a single example or definition, but a starting question plus multiple clues and hints. These help to clear up ambiguities and guide the student towards the correct puzzle answer.