We have been quiet and busy for many months. But finally, we are ready to share with you the newest reincarnation of CoolJugator!
We have come a long way from 2011, and even from our most recent versions. In the new release you’ll find tons of improvements, both noticeable and behind the scenes. We want to tell you all about it so let’s dive straight in!
The first thing you’ve obviously noticed already is the completely redesigned look of CoolJugator. We have listened to your feedback and made a website which is more intuitive to navigate, easier to view on both mobile and desktop and has many features helping you to get the most out of our data.
We have made the tables more compact, eliminating the need for a long scroll. We are also making it possible to tune what you see on the page by default to your own usage preferences. You can now toggle between showing and hiding such elements as verb form translations, transliterations and accentuation. Your choices will be remembered and appear on other pages you visit.
Our new design also works better on mobile devices. The choice of expanded and collapsed tables is also remembered, tailoring your experience of CoolJugator to your personal needs.
To put the icing on the cake, new logos and visual elements make the website look great and more fun to use!
What you see is only a small part of what CoolJugator really is. Under the bonnet we have rebuilt our database (which now runs on Postgres), and redone our search tool (which has versions both on Postgres and Maria DB). These changes makes search and page retrieval much faster.
In addition to that, we have built an entirely new content management system, which can help us modify existing and add new data with ease. Not only that, but now any user can start contributing to the database using this new system! If you would like to contribute, drop us a line!
A new step in the evolution of CoolJugator is the recent launch of an extensive process to involve native speakers to review as much data as possible. As described in About us, we strive to guarantee the highest possible quality of information on our website. Manual review is the conclusive step in this process, which is why we built the new content management system.
Now you can also be part of this process! We are looking for more volunteers to help us make our website the best conjugation resource on the web! If you would like to get involved, please get in touch (see contact details on the bottom of the page). However much or little time you have to spare for us, all of it we’ll put to great use!:)
We have been collecting your feedback and incorporating it as much as possible into the new version of CoolJugator. And we’d be happy to hear what you like and don’t like about it and what else we can improve! You can use one of the links on the footer of the page to submit new ideas and feedback.
The work of course doesn’t stop here. We are planning to release more languages, keep improving the quality of our data and keep making CoolJugator more useful to all language learners around the world! You can help us by providing feedback, volunteering to help in our proofreading mission or by donating to help us run the website.
We hope you like what we’ve built! Happy conjugating!
]]>So many languages have a version of this saying that it would be highly surprising if all of them turned out to be wrong! Indeed, as most language learners realise sooner or later, there is an important gap between knowing the grammar rules passively and being able to use them actively in a real-life scenario. Verb conjugations are a particularly tricky matter in some languages. That’s where you can’t get away without sufficient practice!
With this need in mind, Cooljugator is introducing its first game. You can now test your skills on finding the correct form of the verb in a real sentence (taken from our plentiful examples on the website). The game has two modes: a multiple choice version and a version where you need to type in the correct form yourself.
The game is only available in a limited number of languages so far but we are working to expand it to all languages featured on Cooljugator. It is also currently in beta, meaning you may encounter some mistakes or sentences that are out of context. If you find such errors, please email us!
We would be grateful for any feedback on this game, or ideas for what other ways of practising verb conjugation you might like to see on Cooljugator!
Happy conjugating!
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Advantageous:
Full-time, location independent, with initial probation period of two months. If we like working with you, there will be an opportunity to get involved in some of our other new projects.
If interested, please contact via Facebook or email. Send us your CV and a very brief description of your skills, previous projects and interests.
Please share this blog post or forward to anyone you know who might be interested.
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As enthusiastic language learners ourselves (we speak more than 10 languages between the two of us), we have always been fascinated by how grammar rules shape the nuances of understanding. We enjoy playing around with languages but we also like to share our love for it with other language learners. With this in mind, Cooljugator was born as a personal project for Linas some 5 years ago when he first launched a simple version of the website. He focused on 5 languages that did not have substantial verb conjugation resources available. Though the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were many ideas on how to keep growing the resource, there was never enough time to do so and the project remained dormant for a while.
Then it was in 2015 that Linas met Alexey and the two of us realised that by joining forces we could turn Cooljugator into something bigger and, excuse us the pun, cooler. Since then, we went from 5 languages to the current 37 and have grown to about 2,500 visitors per day. (That’s mid-December 2016.) We believe that this is just the beginning and we would like to see Cooljugator become one of the most useful free resources out there for people trying to tackle the intricacies of grammar in any language.
What makes Cooljugator unique, in our opinion? We want to have as extensive and complete coverage of everything related to verb conjugation as possible. This means that simply providing all the forms for each verb is not enough. We want to explain the exact meaning behind these forms with the help of translations and examples from the living language. We also want to provide grammar explanations that are intuitive, visual and captivating, making conjugation patterns easier to understand and to remember. We’ll let you in on a secret here: very soon we will start rolling out grammar maps that show how each conjugated form is connected to the others both grammatically and in terms of meaning. Finally, we want to do the above for many-many languages. We think that by highlighting similarities and differences in conjugation patterns between different languages, language learners can appreciate the nuances of expressing the right meaning even better. You may be reading about French verbs in English, but some of that Spanish you picked up last summer might come in very handy too. No language is an island!
We want all of the above and no less in our final product. It’s a long way to go and it would be a shame to not share any of the intermediate stages with you, our users. Our resources are not perfect yet. We trust the quality of our conjugation patterns as that is the key information that we are building around. When occasional mistakes do creep in, we act fast to eliminate them as soon as we discover them. You may also have noticed that not all our translations and example sentences are of the highest quality, e.g. where the translation is lacking it is replaced with “do”. In order to avoid infringing the copyright of other resources, we have to rely on automated generation for both translations and examples based on open-source resources. With over 250,000 verbs in our database at the moment, it is not possible for us to proofread all the translations and examples for them manually - but as our resource matures, this will eventually happen. And with your help, our resource can mature even faster!
Cooljugator is a hobby project by two language enthusiasts. We started off by playing with it in our own free time but have gradually seen it become almost our full-time occupation. We have neither sought nor plan to seek any outside funding for it as we want to remain an independent project committed to building the best conjugation resource out there, which would always remain free to use for everyone, everywhere. Earlier this year, we started running ads on Cooljugator to cover our rising expenses. (However, in the future we hope to provide a registration based option to use Cooljugator without the ads for our returning users.) The rising expenses of our project are firstly due to increasing costs of website maintenance as the complexity of the website as well as the number of visitors continue to rise at a fast pace. Secondly, not only has Cooljugator gradually become the main occupation for both of us, but we are also in the process of hiring a new collaborator to help us manage the increasing workload in design, web development and outreach. To be fully transparent about our intentions, in the future, we may begin developing paid-for features such as courses and exercises on Cooljugator, or start selling published grammar materials. However, any of these features would be in addition and not instead of the resources we are currently building, which will always remain free to access.
You can help us in one of two ways, either by donating money to help us run and improve Cooljugator (see button below), or by donating your time to directly contribute to improving Cooljugator’s resources. In the latter case we need native or near-native speakers in all of the languages on our website to help us with double-checking conjugation patterns, improving translations and proofreading our automatically generated example sentences. If you would like to volunteer as much or as little of your time as you can, please send an email to happytohelp@cooljugator.org stating the language(s) you can contribute to. There are plans for some really cool geeky (the linguistic kind of geeky) t-shirts for our volunteers!:)
Thank you if you’ve read this far, we appreciate your interest in what we are doing! As always, if you have any suggestions, ideas, questions or just want to say hi because you are also a language geek, don’t hesitate to write to us at hellothere@cooljugator.org. Happy cooljugating!
We may have a separate post with tips on using CoolJugator, but, for now, it is best you try it out in one of the languages we currently have it at the time of writing.
Please write to us to our e-mail - very happy to receive feedback from users or tips and suggestions!
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