General

gensen:

n. (源泉) spring; source; origin

n. (厳選) careful selection; fine choice

Gensen is an application that helps learners to take their language skills to the next level. It uses a combination of open content and AI with the goal of significantly accelerating memorization and reducing inefficiency in the learning process.

Favoring natural language acquisition

In order to mirror the process which children undergo when acquiring their native language, Gensen divides language forms according to the frequency with which they occur. As a child who learns commonplace vocabulary first, before learning more complex, less frequently occurring forms, you focuses on the most commonly occurring vocabulary, before moving on to less commonly occurring, more specialized content.

Context matters

Gensen provides a sentence based and contextual learning experience. Many learners may spend hundreds of hours studying single word lists without much success. But practice in context significantly increases the memorization of new words while improving grammar knowledge at the same time.

A complete practice

To become fluent in a language, you need to be able to use the language, not just understand it. This means transitioning as many words as possible from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary. By trying to fill in the blanks in sentences, you grow your active and passive vocabulary at the same time.

Familiarizing with chunks

Chunks are groups of words that can be found together in language. Since one of the keys to making quick progress is studying them, Gensen carefully selects sentences that contain these chunks by using advanced computational linguistic tools.

Yes, the Gensen web application is free for everyone with no limit of use.

Gensen runs on the spaced repetition formula, which governs when you should repeat a certain sentence in order for it to transition to your long-term memory. It calculates the most optimal time for you to review vocabulary based on what you’ve already learned and how you learn.

Sentence reviews are spaced by time intervals that lengthen after each correct answer. This interval is smaller when you answer correctly without using the additional hint. After five positive reviews, a sentence is considered mastered and is no longer presented to you. When Gensen no longer has any sentences to propose, you always have the possibility to generate randomly selected series of sentences from those you have already encountered. But in this case, your review schedule is not updated after each sentence.

If you are concerned that you have complete many sentences and are not getting any new ones, don't worry – new sentences will come once you've finished up the review sentences.

Content

Gensen selection algorithm carefully selects sentences that contain groups of words that can be frequently found together.

In order to provide a progressive learning experience, it also ensures that the missing word is among the least rare in the sentence.

Gensen sentences and their translations are largely written by native speakers from the Tatoeba collaborative database of example sentences.

The icons used to illustrate missing words are drawn by the graphic designers from the Noun Project library.

Gensen plays human voices from Tatoeba whenever it has the possibility to do so. Otherwise, it uses an advanced text-to-speech (TTS) system.

Sound effects were produced by creators from the Freesound project.

Word translations are obtained through a multilingual machine translation service.

Ideas for the future

At the moment, you can learn French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian from English. Gensen also have English sentences available for more than twenty languages.

Soon, you should be able to learn French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian from languages other than English.

Follow Gensen on Facebook or Twitter to be informed as soon as a new pair of languages becomes available.

You already can add a shortcut to your home screen that launches Gensen as a standalone web application.

The release of an Android or iOS application featuring an offline mode is not planned yet.

Currently, you can't select individual learning goals. But this feature may be added in the next version of Gensen.

Bugs and errors

Gensen automatically selects and bundles both human and machine generated content. Since neither humans nor machines are infallible, you might notice a few errors here and there.

Do not hesitate to report one as soon as you see it by clicking on the “report error” button available in the bottom-right menu.

Sentences reported by a significant proportion of users are immediately suspended in order to continuously improve the Gensen user experience.

If you've noticed something and think it might be a bug, here's what you can send to our contact email address:

  • Take a screenshot of the problem and describe what is not working as expected.
  • Explain what you were doing before the bug occurred.
  • Note if the bug occurs repeatedly or disappears after a page refresh or a logout.
  • Include the kind of device you are on and the version of your browser (e.g. Chrome 53).