We probably could’ve done this a while ago. Thanks to the hard work of our Spanish learners we now have over 460 books and 490 videos fully graded! Not only that but they span difficulties from beginner all the way up to L40+. Congrats to them!
I think Korean will move out of beta this week as well, with a little more work on benchmarking. German, unfortunately, needs a lot more user support before we get there!
How does starting a new language work?
If it’s a language which has it’s own Amazon that has good coverage of books, the upload process is the same as Japanese and doesn’t take much work from me.
However, in order to kickstart the grading system, it requires us to set ‘benchmark’ books & videos at certain levels. That requires community discussion of which benchmarks make sense and then grading those benchmarks against enough content to get a critical mass of books / videos fully graded.
Eventually, I hope that entire benchmarking process will be community led without involvement from me. We’d just need to give language forum moderators a bit more tooling in order to run the benchmarking process well
All that being said, starting a new language isn’t on the immediate horizon. In the latter half of the year, French and English would be the most natural to add.
2 Development Partners are Joining Natively!
I’m very pleased to announce that @nikoru and @mathew will be joining Natively as development partners! Please welcome them!
@nikoru has been a long-time, valued member of our community, as I’m sure most of you know . In addition to her passion for Japanese, she’s also an expert in React/TypeScript with many years of experience and she currently runs clean code clinics part time. As a long time user, her first priority is to help us rework our frontend codebase and make the website run much more smoothly. I’m very much looking forward to having her onboard!
@mathew is someone who you will not know but I’m sure you will soon! He only recently found Natively through a Marumori discord and saw my notice. He’s a fluent Japanese speaker, linguist, taiko-drummer who’s been using Python/Django professionally for the last 10 years in a variety of research, educational and language learning contexts. He’s passionate about language learning technology and, as he’s currently only working part-time, he’s been looking for a meaningful project to join. I’m super excited he’s coming on board!
Over the past month of searching, I’ve met so many wonderful folks interested in helping out Natively, thank you all! It’s overwhelming how much support I’ve received. If I could onboard all of you, I would. If we have any more opportunity to contribute as a developer in the future, i’ll let you all know
Upcoming
For the time being, I’m mostly focused on onboarding @mathew and @nikoru. In that context, we’re planning on focusing on infrastructure for the start of this year. That includes addressing long outstanding bugs, data issues and overhauling our code to be a bit more robust. Not only does that improve the site and set us up for the longterm, but it is a great way to onboard new developers
Do you have any kind of public board where we can see what bugs (and features) are on the horizon?
Also, do you still want reports in the Natively > Product Requests section or should they go here? Or do you plan to make a new place like a dedicated bug thread?
@nikoru I look forward to you fixing the blindingly bright sections in the dark theme.
I don’t really use it right now that much but with team members coming on board, I expect it will become a good place to see upcoming features.
I think Product Requests is still the best place for bugs.. even though people do report them in a variety of places.
If there’s a critical bug however, reporting here is best, with an @brandon.
I know . Although css bugs aren’t exactly @nikoru’s favorite, I think you’re right the dark theme should be on the docket… very lacking in certain places
And watching the process has been great, especially to see all the people who put themselves forward, I’m so happy to see the huge show of support for this project
So happy to see more people getting involved with the site! Hope the on-boarding goes smoothly!
Was re-running the failed series syncs meant to create series pages automatically? If so, a week later still none of the books I submitted with Amazon series pages that were missing Natively series pages have been updated, so the sync may have failed again.