- Hey, everyone!
This is Benny Lewis from Fluent in Three Months.
I want to very quickly show you this app
that I've been trying out.
It's called HiNative, and you can get it for both
Android and iPhones, but what I think is very cool,
is that this is actually an app by the people behind
Lang-8, so some of you might know this site already.
As a site where you can type out your attempts to use
the written forms of the languages you're learning,
sharing with communities, and get some feedback on it.
So, they've kind of taken that idea of community feedback,
and they've put it into this pretty cool app.
I just wanted to give you a quick look at it then,
show you how I've been using it, see if you can
get use out of it yourself.
So, we have, the home screen here, essentially similar
to Lang-8, you help other people with their questions,
and that helps you to be seen more when you have
a question to be asked.
So, you can see on my profile here,
that I have set myself up as a learning these languages.
You can put up to five at a time, so:
French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish at the moment,
and all sorts of other information about myself.
I've been testing out the app.
And I'll be using it when I have these last minute
doubts about how to say something in a language.
So, on the home screen you can flip between the various
questions being asked in each of the languages.
Here, for instance, are some questions coming up in
French from the community.
We got the other languages that I happen to have.
As well as my native language.
At the moment, they let you select U.K. or U.S.
I'm just selecting U.K.
just because that's how I would write in English.
If I see any of these I feel like answering,
then I can click through and do that.
So, this guy or girl is saying,
"How do you say 'howdy' in daily conversation?"
You see, people are actually answering that question.
And, so let's try this right now with some questions
that I could ask.
So you go to ask.
And what I like is that you have various different ways
that you can ask the question.
When you want to translate something,
you might just go to a dictionary.
In the case of Spanish, I might go to a word-reference,
for instance, but that might be okay when you're translating
a single word, but what if you're translating something a
little bit longer?
So, how do you say this in Spanish?
You're asking actual people, the community,
to give you the best translation that they know
works in the natural language.
Here I can say something like,
"I'm a blogger"
That's a good one, because I've always,
when I learn a new language, words like this,
words like "blogger".
You might look it up, and maybe
it's used one way in one country,
or one way in another.
But, it's a hard word to translate, so,
I'm gonna say that I'm a blogger and post it.
And, now that's out there in the world, we'll see
if anyone replies to that in the next few minutes.
But, there's other ones.
"Does this sound natural?"
So, your question would be phrased like this,
as well as writing it out, so I could
instead of translating and getting someone else
to do the work for me, I want to learn myself.
I want to try to produce the language and get
some feedback, so I would use that with this one, here.
But, instead of typing it,
I can also use the microphone function,
and try to speak it out.
So, I'll give that a whirl.
I'm going to hold this button down.
(speaking in foreign language)
And then I can write it out.
(mutters in foreign language)
So, we got the text and we got the audio.
Post it, and out it goes.
So, I'm going to get rated by people,
if that's natural or unnatural,
or they just don't understand what I'm saying.
Okay.
Show me an example sentence, so you can imagine,
if you see a new word, and you think you understand it,
but you need to see it in the context of a real sentence.
You can put it in there.
What does this mean?
Again, it's like translating the other way around,
you see some Spanish, you try to find it in a dictionary,
you don't really understand.
In fact, I'll show you.
You might think, "I'll just use Google Translate for that"
I would not do in a lot of cases.
Let me give you an example.
If I say like,
(speaking foreign language)
Okay.
All right, so we got something out of there.
Let's try this in
Oh, all right, just got a notification.
Someone answered my question, gotta see what that is.
You can see how fast it was.
Okay, so if I try to put this into Google Translate,
there's actually a cool new Google Translate thing,
if I copy something and go into Google Translate,
and paste in that, the translation is:
I take five days without leaving home.
That's not very understandable.
Because this is a kind of quirk of Spanish,
that they use the word llevar, to talk about something
you've been doing for a certain amount of time.
So, you really need to get a native's feedback on that,
because Google Translate is not going to help you.
Okay, so these are like some of the features,
you can ask "what's the difference?",
give two different words that you might use
in different contexts.
Free question.
So, I'll show you an example of the free question,
where I kind of wanted to explain the context
of what I was trying to figure out.
But, when you are using the app,
you can either try to see, or add it to the community,
see if people get back to you on it.
Or, they have a premium feature that gives you ten tickets
you can use one of the tickets, then you're at
the very, very top.
So, if I urgently want to find something out,
I'd use that.
But, a paid feature, and you might have seen
while I was scrolling around the screen,
that when we're on the Spanish page,
I actually have a question that is coming up
at the very top here.
(notification alert sound)
Someone has answered my question.
You can see how fast the community is on this.
This one I posted the other day,
and I was trying to explain that I want to know
how to use this word right.
Because, I know from French I might use it this way,
but I'm not sure in Spanish.
So, I have the explanation of my question in Spanish.
And, then a little I added in English.
And now, I have all these answers from people.
So, I can read, and they give me full examples,
someone gives me an alternative,
I have answers in both English and Spanish.
So, this is a fascinating way to get a very detailed,
rather than a one word answer from people.
Alright.
So.
Let's see my notifications.
Someone's already answered my most recent question.
To say, "I haven't been out for five days",
so that, you can see that using the word "take"
like Google Translate suggested,
that is not going to help me.
So, I'm gonna give this person a thumbs up for their help.
And the other question I just asked,
"How do you say, I'm a blogger",
they said "Soy bloggero", so that's
an interesting way to see that I can answer the question.
I'm gonna see if there's more answers,
because I'm wondering if there should be a "u" there,
in that word, bloggero.
But that's the thing, is it's actually a community thing,
so you actually see several answers for confirmation.
Actually, yeah, this person is a native English speaker.
So, I'm asking this in Spanish, so I will wait
until I get a reply from the native Spanish speakers,
just to be 100% sure.
And, yeah, the reason I've been getting so many replies
to that other one, the question about the cafe,
that you see here, is because I used one of my
tickets to put it on the screen at the top.
Which puts it more prominently placed.
I will use that for urgent questions,
I will just, say for less urgent things,
like I've been doing here, they just get
answered as they come up.
So yeah, just wanted to share this with you.
I'm finding it pretty cool.
I've only used it for a couple of things,
but I think when I have urgent things that I
need to post on my blog, or if I know
I'm going to have a Skype session with somebody,
I want to make sure I'm saying it right.
Then, I will probably be using this to do it,
because of the speed that I get those answers.
This app is going to be one of my new must-download apps.
So, check it out, and
let me know what you think in the comments.
I really hope it helps you learn your language.
If you select any, you just saw the five, that I used there.
But, any language you're learning,
put it in, and the community will get back to you on it.
And, yeah, play around with it yourself.
You'll see lots of fun stuff in it.
Okay, thanks for watching, everybody.