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Show HN: Three Emojis, a daily word puzzle for language learners

28 points by knuckleheads

by why_at

1 subcomments

Nice work! That was pretty fun.
There were definitely some words in there which I had never heard even as a native English speaker. One suggestion I would make if the intent is to teach people a new language would be to limit the word list based on how commonly used the words are. I don't think it helps non-proficient speakers to learn extremely obscure words that nobody uses.
You could make it so that the X most common words are needed to win and the rest are bonus points or something.

by oneeyedpigeon

1 subcomments

I liked it, but a couple of bits of feedback:
1. I thought there were a few too many clues of various types. The emoji, combined with the word list in alphabetical order, the part-filled words, AND the infinite guesses. I'll admit, I ended up guessing quite a few times, which slightly soured the experience.
2. Some of the words are really weird. I'm not sure all of the onomatopoeic words should be in there. And I don't think the acronyms (e.g NNW) should be in there.
Other than that, though, I thought it was a great version of the NYT equivalent. Loved that there were so many words — it's a shame that #2 would mean fewer, but I still think it would be worth being a bit pickier on balance. My partner didn't quite get the emjoi clues until I explained an example, but I thought a lot of them were quite clever!

by zaene

1 subcomments

Really crazy seeing this -- I've been working on my own multi-lingual spelling bee clone as a personal project for the last few weeks. You don't have share any trade secrets if you don't want to, but I'm wondering how your experience has been coming up with "playable" sets of letters? For Italian I found that a lot of 7-letter sets have relatively few words you can make with them, and for the ones that do it's been a fun challenge trying to curate the actually "fun" boards by looking through word lists of a language I'm not yet fluent in myself. I'm working on a blog post about it that I was thinking of sharing here sometime soon.
Some feedback on the UI - at least on desktop Chrome, the title part of your scoreboard area is being cut off and the "How to Play" section has the text totally flush with the top, so you might want to look into your margins or padding there to give everything some breathing room. There's also a bug in your shuffle algorithm -- the letter in the top right cell never changes when you shuffle the letters. The cell buttons are also a little unresponsive. It seems like there are some dead zones where the hover animation doesn't get triggered and clicking the cell doesn't actually input the letter.
I like how you've added some features to make it easier for language learners to find words. Are you yourself studying German? And if so have you found it fun/useful?

by littlekey

1 subcomments

This is cool! I see others have mentioned the acronyms, I'd also say some of the interjections are kinda lame, like having to guess both aw and aww, ew and eww, and just weird ones like awoo. I think cutting down the list serves a double purpose of making the game shorter as well. I enjoyed it, but 67 words is a lot to get through for something that should be a quick daily play.

by knollimar

1 subcomments

by stOneskull

1 subcomments

great! i especially appreciate being able to continue my game after restarting my computer. thank you :-)
one thing.. 'ween' is a word.

by fwip

3 subcomments

Cool idea - I could see playing this daily.
Some of it was a little frustrating, mostly the acronyms. Labeling them as such might help, because I was going mad trying to figure out "NNW" and "WWOOF.". Also, performance was not great on my older Android phone - the app would sometimes miss letters that I was sure I'd clicked.