Still, I can guess the languages of 2/3 of the songs without hearing a word, by various letters on the screen (Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Hindi, Arabian, often Turkish, Kazakh, Chechen by their special letters). Faces and style often help more than the sound, too. (My highest score in solo mode without a timer is 104 so far).
Death metal tracks, highly distorted hip-hop tracks, ethereal choral track are usually hardest to determine.
Besides, it's a nice intro into various kinds of music all over the world, and across many decades. Worth playing just for that.
I wish it weren't song-based, though it's an understandable implementation.
As others have noted, there are often many cues 'n' clues even before a single word is uttered. But also, I have trouble enough picking out words in my native tongue, let alone when transmogrified by musical prosody and accompaniment.
Today I learned that Polish sounds nothing like what I thought it sounded like :)
We definitely are! Reports are too important for us, we are actively evaluating reports and our first update has improved our system too much thanks to reports we got from community. We are glad that we have such a cooperative community.
Wow OP, such a simple and entertaining game. Good job!
I scored 290. As others noted, the text on screen is a big clue, but I think it's fine and can be a part of the game - the same goes for Geoguessr afterall (with the road markings or different kinds of Google cars, etc).
For some of the videos there is very little voice and/or it starts late and it's tricky to find with the progress slider. Perhaps the game could play the video from a timestamp of first spoken line. But on the other hand enjoying the full songs can be also nice and culturally enriching.
Getting Hebrew and Yiddish as options in the same round was tricky.
Strongly agree. I could see a "hard mode" in which you only get the audio, but I consider the clever use of all available clues (text, video content, appearance of performer) to be part of the game.
Yeah, one opening screen included "#tamilsoundservice". :) (Tamil is one of the languages) I suppose I could try to ignore the video, but it was fun trying to use it for clues. "Oh they look like Bollywood dancers so I'll guess Hindi." This backfired on me when I tried guessing one based on the subtitles I saw, which I assumed were for karaoke, but the answer was completely wrong. I guess they were for translation, not karaoke.
Yeah, I think to do this right you need to block all visuals. I was able to guess nearly all of mine correctly just from visual clues.
Part of the reason I did so, however, was because the lyrics were often drowned out by the music. Hard to guess when you can barely hear what’s being sung.
Too bad there are a lot of clues in the video portion of clips. Also, the first challenge I got was obvious japanese (and there was anime art in the video), but none of the answers was 'japanese', so it got me confused. Turns out it was a mistake.
Overall, very enjoyable, but I think that whole video should be blurred, maybe even completely disabled.
I'd say, both. I wish the licenses were fluid across apps/platforms.
Say, I have a right to listen to Madonna from my Youtube Music subscription? A game, with the given permission to access my "music licenses" should be able to use that.
There's a report video button on top of the video for these. Far too many incorrect videos ruins the game a bit: You're on a streak and no video means you can lose 3 lives. I've reported about 50 videos so far.
I definitely was able to use some external clues from the videos even though they try to blur the hints. I would not necessarily guess Armenian from Turkish immediately but I am sure able to differentiate between Latin derived Turkish script on the screen and Armenian script.
Hello folks, I am one of the two developers behind langoguessr.com.
I've come across this website while googling the url and first of all I wanna thank each one of you for taking your time and playing it& sharing your criticisms and feedbacks. It mean a lot for us.
We just released our first update to website in the light of the feedbacks and we just included the first pass of the 'audio only' game mode. It is heavily WIP and subject to change, we are students in Final week so we had to deliver the request of the community so we published as it is. It will change heavily and it will has it's own gamemode&leaderboard.
We also updated our song picking algorithm so you will less likely to have those who are not suitable for our usecase. We are also developing an extra solution to address that too but it seems like it will take a little while. Thank you again for your kind words everyone.
Agreed on the calls for letting the player hide album art and start in the middle of the track. Also had a bug where a Spanish song was classified as Latin.
- Some videos are blocked on copyright claims, would be nice if they would auto-reload
- sometimes my mouse would reveal the title of the video (alt text)
The indian subcontinent kinda has an unfair advantage to popping up with their 20-something languages. Very hard for me to distinguish between them, and the rest of SE Asia tbh.
Should definitely only play the audio to make it harder.
I found a slovak song that was singing in English, but I recognized the surname and put 2 and 2 together.
52 with at least a million native speakers according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe . Of course, limiting it by number of speakers will exclude languages with strong political or cultural presence, just to mention a few, Maltese, Icelandic or Welsh.
If you’re on an iPhone you can power off then on to get to the Lock Screen. iOS will tell you the name and artist of the video that’s playing.
I don’t know if there’s a way for the author to disable that. But I think it’s a valid part of the metagame to use that information when guessing. Kinda like how the top geoguessr players use camera artifacts to deduce where the photo was taken.
I'm German of Turkish origin and I just now realized that I love how Slovenian sounds. What a densely colorful continent, perhaps only matched by India (Or perhaps Africa dunno).
Tried it. The second video was not available in my country (Portugal), and there is no option to report this, only "video is removed" (it's not, just region-blocked)
Definitely feel like I'm playing a bit more GeoGuessr than Langoguessr. First one was a music video where I could get a good guess on the location by the style of license plates and background scenery. Second was a still frame shot of an album cover featuring the Armenian flag. Third one had no defining features and suddenly I wasn't so good at the game!
Hey we just included an audio only mode, you might wanna try that too! It is our first pass of the system as described in our first comment here, we would be glad if you can share your experience!
Unfortunately, the leaderboards are currently dominated by cheaters reporting times of 0.0s. However, once you exclude those then my current rank of #28 actually is #7, which isn't bad at all.
There needs to be a report for "There's an obvious give away in the video" one I got had a .bg web address and Cyrillic text and there was only one option of a Cyrillic language.
Wow, this is super fun, and a great sampler of a wide variety of music!
I was curious about the composition of music, therefore a friend and I created/curated frequency-domain visualizations of a variety of music in different languages and interesting sounds using the Welch power spectral density estimation algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform. The visualizations are fun to look at and with some practice you can distinguish the different instruments and vocal tracks in each song.
As well as the a cappella Starships (Nicki Minaj cover) by Mike Tompkins which has a mind-blowing breakdown of how he built up the composition from different vocals at the end:
https://youtu.be/vDqHpWY1UD4?t=209
Still, I can guess the languages of 2/3 of the songs without hearing a word, by various letters on the screen (Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Hindi, Arabian, often Turkish, Kazakh, Chechen by their special letters). Faces and style often help more than the sound, too. (My highest score in solo mode without a timer is 104 so far).
Death metal tracks, highly distorted hip-hop tracks, ethereal choral track are usually hardest to determine.
Besides, it's a nice intro into various kinds of music all over the world, and across many decades. Worth playing just for that.