Another exciting day here at Popling! I’ve added audio pronunciations to seven German glash card sets totaling 593 audio pronunciations! Again, each card is pronounced normally, then slowly, syllable by syllable. Audio is currently only available in the web interface, but I’m hoping to add support in the desktop app in the next month.

As with the Spanish flash cards, audio is only available only to pro users. The twenty dollars a year is worth it to work on your pronunciation, plus you get a ton of other great features.

If you would like more German flash cards, leave a comment linking to the specific flash card set! Current German flash cards with audio are:

100 German Descriptive Qualities
German Basic Phrases
German Numbers
German Basic Operations
German Picturable Things A to K
German Basic Nouns S to Z
German Basic Opposites

Next to get audio: French and Japanese flash card sets.

It’s an exciting day here at Popling! I’ve just added audio pronunciations to twenty Spanish Flash card sets. That totals over 900 audio pronunciations containing both words and phrases! Each card is pronounced normally, then slowly, syllable by syllable. Audio is currently only available in the web interface, but I’m hoping to add support in the desktop app in the next month.

The audio is only available only to pro users, so get your pro account today and learn to pronounce those words you’ve been memorizing. It will take your Spanish to a whole new level.

The flash cards were read by a friend who lives in the mainland Mexico city of Tehuacán. I think you’ll find his voice is clear and friendly! I’ll be adding more voices to the cards as well, so if you’d like these recordings in a different dialect, please feel free to leave a comment.

Key Spanish Phrases, numbers, Phrases That Trip You Up,
Commonly Missed Spanish Words , Spanish Basic Operations,
Days of the week and 15 more sets…

Next to get audio: French, German and Japanese flash card sets.

You’ll notice Popling is at least one, if not two bajillion times faster since just this morning.

I’ve achieved this boost by removing the complicated card selection feature from the site for all users. For the time being, cards will be selected linearly. The much cooler algorithm will find it’s way back to the site when I have the little MySQL gremlins worked out of it.

I’ve just launched a round of changes to the Popling web interface. The biggest is a temporary change to how Popling selects which cards you view.

For free accounts, Popling will temporarily select cards linearly. This is to speed the server up for everyone. Pro accounts will continue to get the benifits of seeing their hard list and recently missed cards more often.

Other changes include:

Retention Settings: Flash card set creators set the retention (requiring a user to type the question in) default, but users can still turn retention on and off in flash card sets they subscribe to.

Immediate retention, no review round: If you have retention on, you immediately see it, no review cards first, so study the popling once before diving in!

Bugs: lots of little fixes.

As always, let me know if you see any bugs!

A site called komando.com linked to Popling on Friday and sent so much traffic to the site, I didn’t have time to thank them. I immediately went into tech support mode helping out all the new users who were signing up. Thanks to their great feedback, that process is now much easier.

Komando is the site of radio talk show host and author Kim Komando who seems to be doing a great job of help ordinary people be better geeks. In addition to her radio show, her site features a daily digital downloads, cool sites and videos, news and more.

You should go check it out.

Thanks for the traffic Kim and team!

A small bug in the firefox addon that caused problems with clicking the flash card notification popup has been fixed.

Cruise on over to the addon page and click the install button to update.

Helloooooo to all the new visitors to Popling.net! There are so many of you we are having a hard time keeping up! Our mail server is a little backlogged, so your registration verification emails may take a while to get to you.
We’re working hard to get this fixed.

Also, the site may be a little slow due to all the traffic. Don’t worry though, the little hamster is going as fast as it can.

Jamble’s awesome set of cards finally prompted me to add a new feature: card reversal.

Jamble’s cards are Spanish > English, but personally, I like to learn from English > Spanish. I find having to type the Spanish word in the retention dialog really helps me remember the word.

To reverse a set of flash cards, subscribe to the Popling and select ‘edit preferences’, then check the ‘Reverse’ button.

Popling was been featured on LifeHacker yesterday, via a link on downloadsquad.com. That’s to both of those sites for all the traffic!

For all you geeks, the write-ups yesterday brought in about 1,200 new sign ups on 3,300 to 4,000 unique visitors. That’s a pretty nifty conversion rate, if I do say so myself.

I would like to extend a special thanks to all the new pro users for supporting the service. I hope you all find the extra features are worth the $20.

Just a quick note to let you know the Firefox add-on is now compatible with Firefox 3.6. You can upgrade by going to Tools > Add-ons, finding the Popling add-on and clicking enable.