Anyways - great game!

While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.

I'd love to see a couple of adjustments:

First, the scores right now aren't very meaningful. The chance of winning each round is highly dependent on being lucky with the multiple choices (e.g. I'll always be able to guess Spanish vs. anything else, but my if options are two African languages, it's a coin toss). I think the distribution of scores over several games will end up being similar to playing a series of random coin tosses. My own scores varied greatly.

Second, it would be great to have more clips of each language, without having the same person speaking twice. The educational element of the game gets lost when you start overtraining on the same clip.

On the second point -- I completely agree. Validating the samples takes time, but I promise I'll add more as soon as I can.

Thanks for playing :)

Exactly! I got Swedish vs. some Asian language once, correctly guessed swedish and then the next round was the same audio clip and some other languages. The game had told me that it was swedish already, so it was easy.

My only advice is to avoid having the same language, or at least same wave file being played twice in a row (It happened few times with me, and I've played it for 5 times in a row).

Also maybe introduce something like in the TV shows, where you can get use "jokers" (hints) such as - remove half of the languages that are not (when there are more than 4 or 5 I guess), etc.

Or maybe let the player risk, by asking for more languages even on lower levels, but for more points.

It's entertaining :) I was actually thinking if you are in the car, and listening to this as a game how would one be able to answer (google glass with eye tracking?), or maybe that's just bad idea for driving.

A suggestion: I really don't like the design of having the next question be a new browser history entry. It took me about 20 back clicks to get back to HN to post this comment.

And good luck distinguishing between scandinavian languages if you're not native. I'm Danish and I sometimes confuse Swedish with Norwegian.

I'll put it in a manner you can understand. I see that you're Dane. I suppose the US has a significant populace with Danish ancestry. How would you like it if they refer to you as the other kind of Dane. I've also come across anecdotes where Brits visiting the US were told by some rude people to learn to speak English properly.

In an American context, it is understandable to think "Indian" signifies "American Indian". Now that East Indian immigration verges on outnumbering American Indians, that will probably change, but it's pretty silly to get offended by historical geographical misunderstandings. I mean, let's vilify Columbus for the right reasons. Besides, what's wrong with Native Americans? Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them? It's not like someone called you "French". b^)

...learn to speak English properly.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among speakers of English who've spoken with many other speakers of English, that the worst English-speakers are the English. I find the Irish to be the most intelligible and melodious, especially those Irish who have lived overseas. "BBC" English, however, is not the way that most English people speak, and besides the UK has no monopoly on that dialect.

If only it were just historical!

> Besides, what's wrong with Native Americans?

Nothing! That's an excellent term.

> Why would it be a put-down to share a name with them?

I never said anything about it being a put-down. To me, it's just annoying when people write "Indian" and assume that it will be understood to mean "Native American".

My point (with bringing up Danes and Brits too) was that some manners of speaking reek of ignorance. "In an American context" sounds like a weak excuse to perpetuate expressions rooted in ignorance. For example, when I learnt of the appropriate meaning of the word "Caucasian"[1], I stopped using it to refer generally to people of European descent. Now, I get annoyed when Americans use it that way ;-)

> Now that East Indian immigration ...

"East Indian" does not mean to me what it means to you. I'm South Indian. Historically, "East Indian" meant something else entirely [2].

[1]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/01/stop-using-th...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indies

Anyone who insists upon only a single meaning for each word will have a considerably poorer vocabulary because of it.

Furthermore, if you're going to rule out all words with spurious etymologies, I suspect you're going to have to eliminate quite a lot of words from your vocabulary. For example, stop using "turkey" to refer to the bird eaten in certain parts of the world.

You seem to greatly overestimate our ability to distinguish among different word meanings based on context. The meanings are not all appropriate when they conflict. I first discovered this conflicting meaning of "Caucasian" when discussing something with a Polish friend. Unlike me, he did not default to the popular American meaning of "Caucasian". That led to us misunderstanding each other for a few minutes. "Indian" has caused me enough headaches online. I'll reiterate: not everyone defaults to popular American (mis-)usages.

Leave aside the matter of popular usage for the time being. Do you also think that if population geneticists were to use all these conflicting meanings, it would cause them no problems at all?

I hope my explanation also disabuses you of the notions that I'm "[insisting] upon only a single meaning for each word" or trying to "rule out all words with spurious etymologies". Don't worry about me having a considerably poorer vocabulary; I do extremely well on most tests. When I write, people may have trouble understanding my point, but it's never been because I used to wrong words. Addendum: if it were to turn out that I have used the wrong words, I'd learn, and correct myself.

Is that also "annoying" to you? After all, some hillbilly somewhere might not appreciate the many nuances of differing cultural practices between Sumatra and Tamil Nadu. Worse yet, she might not even care! Is there any aspect of any European language that doesn't annoy you?

Are you seriously offering that as your reason too? That some hillbilly does it?

I'm done here.

The put-down is that Asian Indians are "the other kind", which implies second-class.

    Kannada
    Primarily spoken in: India
    # of speakers: 38 million
    Language family: Dravidian
    Writing sample: ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ಬರೆಯಿರಿ
    Is awesome because: Reduplication! You write the word 
    twice, replacing the start of the second one with 'gi-',
    to get "and related things". So if "books" is 
    'pustaka', "books and related things" is 
    'pustaka-gistaka'. Awesome.

(Especially since you have to wait quite a bit before the next sample loads. Which, as some others have pointed out, shouldn't have to be that slow. How many minutes of audio does this game have in total? I think using a modern codec (say OGG or AAC, not MP3) you could go with a pretty low bitrate (VBR), would it be feasible to just load all the clips in one chunk and play slices of that?)

Another idea for extra information: show on a world/continent map where this language is spoken. I expected to do really bad at this game since I am awfully bad at geography. But it turns out I'm doing pretty good (15/15, still got 3 lives, but I'm taking a break), since I'm pretty good with language I guess (even though I only speak NL/EN/DE and a bit FR), I know enough about others to make an educated guess. And of course you don't need to know where something is to guess the language :) Seriously, ask me to point those places on a map and I'd fail miserably--hence showing the location(s) where it's spoken would be a welcome training for me :)

To the maker of this game: great work! Love it!

.. and then I got 3 wrong in a row :) so, 750 points.

Question to the author: last one I got wrong was Turkish. I would've definitely considered that if I had seen the option, but I don't remember I did. I probably just overlooked it. But it would be nice if it'd show all the options with the wrong one red and the right one green or something, just to comfort any thoughts of "was that a bug or did I overlook something?"

also, how about localisation of the game?

It's be great if there were an iOS app of this. You'd easily get my $2. :)

700 here.

It might be good to ask the user where they are from (non-intrusively of course, maybe a simple country selector or IP lookup) to get another dimension on the statistics. Or what languages they already know as well might be interesting when looking at the results.

Traceback: http://pastebin.com/iJ5wfaMe

Running the web-page under root sounds dangerous.

Are you a Quechua speaker? I'd love to add it.

here is a link of a youtube where it is spoken clearly (maybe you can use that ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AjTi4q_kIo