English to Malibu

Today, I still decided on it.
Discuss with Habr's audience the format of learning English, which we use on our project and try to prove that he has the right to exist along with other great services.


You can immediately see what will be discussed: malibu.io .
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Or walk with me from the beginning. This is not a long story.

To study English, I sat on foreign entertainment sites:
9gag, reddit, imgur ... etc (sorry, "etc.").
I really liked the process, because for the rest, I got some benefit for myself, developed - I learned new words, expressions and saw how native speakers really use English. And most importantly - it was not so shameful for the time spent.
Then I wrote out all the new words for myself in a column in the gmail draft, so that you could later go and repeat.

There were a few inconveniences with this:

• The very first trouble was that the layout of sites often did not allow easy (without opening the web inspector) to highlight a word or expression. On all these sites, the most key and interesting text goes in the title and is a link to a post page where you cannot start to select text in the middle (instead, the entire title link will start dragging and dropping).
• Highlighting words in mobile applications is not possible, and with the mobile version of the site is also not wildly convenient.
• I had to switch to the tab with the translator, and then to the tab with the mail, in order to add a new word to my improvised dictionary. Lesson is a bit of a chore.
• If it was a new phrase, then I had to write it in Google search: the phrase + "meaning" to find out what it means.
• When I went through the list of my words, I did not have the opportunity to return to the context in which I met these words. It was the most classic column “ang. word - translation.

Starting to watch entertainment materials on foreign sites, I still continued to sometimes go to Russian-speaking.
The feeling, however, was that a good 30 percent, if not more, are materials copied from Western sites.
It caused a little negative emotions, because Often users gave someone else's wonderful posts for their own. For example, I was most angry with the user who translated a very interesting investigation + hypothesis of the collapse of the MH370 from a foreign blog and issued it for his work. The authority in the league of detectives was provided.

All this motivated me to create a project where copying materials from foreign sources would be beneficial for people studying English, and the link to the original will be kept.

The project is committed to hosting interesting materials from foreign sites, citing not only Russian translation, but also English from the original.

The format of materials we have

We came to him in a natural way and never conducted a serious analysis on the effectiveness, but here's what I think in the end:

I like it in it:

• Learning words in context and with vivid visual associations.
• Interest in the materials under study (everything I ever managed to learn successfully in English was done with incredible enthusiasm when I was not indifferent to something)
• Fast content. Yes, we sometimes have long posts ( http://malibu.io/post/3902/ ), but even they are very light in content, not overloaded with text. This means that you can come to us and see a few posts at any time (at least for 5 minutes while driving or waiting from the front) and you can stop at any time. In my opinion, in order to master the language, it must be made part of your life (at least a small part).
• Translation immediately written below. We recommend reading in English and watching the picture, and later, if you can’t figure it out, watch the translation (so it made it in a thinner gray font). And for the more advanced in English, we recommend turning off the Russian language in the settings, and when you find a new word, you can click on it and the translation will appear from below. We could go the way of using the LingQ / LinguaLeo technology, but in my opinion it is not quite suitable for our project. I would not like to burden users with the task of sorting out translations from the English-Russian dictionary. Still, according to the idea, people come to Malibu first of all to relax, but at the same time they improve English. I think if the site always displayed only English, then we would not be able to focus on a wide audience. Posts in one English will repel users for whom this language is like impassable jungle. By the way, it is believed that the most effective way to learn English is immersion in an English-speaking environment. But there is one nuance. One dive is not enough. Try to throw into the water of a person who can not swim. It would seem that complete immersion in the necessary environment, but it will sink. When immersing in a foreign language, an assistant is needed who will give a hand, will assist in a difficult situation. In the best case, these are your parents, who explain to you complex unfamiliar words based on simple ones that you already understand.

I do not like it:

• Perhaps as much as I don’t like to read the big “walls” of the text in English, I’m not happy about the opposite side of these viral headlines “the most ... in the world ...", "awesome, incredible ..." that are more common in entertainment projects
• Not that it is not pleasant, but it is necessary to understand that only on these materials you cannot master the language. Do not master grammar and speaking. But everything must be done in the complex.

// TODO: add both lists with comments from comments

My subjective conclusion: what we have done is not a universal tutorial. This is just another format to learn. For those people who are already studying English, he can remarkably complement the already existing approaches: courses, series, films, Skype, books. There is also hope that he will push to the study of people who were too lazy to take up.

A separate item is the dream of the project - in the longer term, to help foreigners learn Russian!

PS

• Maybe someone will be interested in how the posting of materials. English text and images are pulled from a post from a foreign site, Google Translate API gives a machine translation. If everything is not perfect with him, then you can manually fix it. Done! In addition, the site's script scrolls through all the words in a post and refers to the Yandex.Diction API to link them. The latter works correctly at this stage in ~ 90% of cases, and we check posts before we bring them to the main one.
• I am sure that there are some minor bugs on the project, but this is not the most important thing at this stage. First of all I want to check out the concept.
• This is the second attempt to tell in Habré about the project. The first did not take place for reasons known only to UFOs alone.