Listening controls

Question

This is my first impression of Kwiziq. I came here to develop listening skills, but my impression is that Kwiziq is mostly oriented toward grammar.

Basic audio controls like pause and rewind are missing. The "vocabulary" help is hardly more than a rough (thought for thought) translation, not a detailed explication of the literal meaning / etymology /gender /conjugation of the words. There seems to be no control of the playback speed.

Being a newbie, I may have missed something. If so, please enlighten me.

Answer

Hola JosephKwiziq was initially more oriented towards grammar, but we have been adding different types of exercises to expand on the different skills and aspects of the language, offering now a great variety of activities.In terms of pausing when you're  listening to a transcription of a bilingual reader, you can indeed press "pause", however there is no tool yet to offer a "rewind" if you want to re-listen to the previous sentence for example. This is something that our developers are considering for the future - we agree that this would be a good bonus. I will also pass on your thoughts about controlling the speed. We are careful to record our reading exercises at an appropriate speed bearing in mind the level of that specific exercise. You don't mention our dictations on your message but if your main aim is to develop your listening skill you may consider our dictations where you are first offered  the audio of the whole text and then you transcribe what you listen by listening to it step by step - here you can listen to the individual sentences as many times as you want before writing your answer and submitting it (with the button "play again") As I said, I will pass this on to our team to be considered.Gracias y saludos. Inma

Answer

Just to comment on Inma's answer:  These basic audio controls are already available on most competitive "listening" products.  But playback speed is typically limited to 100%, 75%, or 50% speed. This of course is related to the speed of the original speaker. Even better would be to allow "infinitely variable" speed to allow minor adjustments for different speakers or to allow gradually speeding up successive passes as aural comprehension improves.

Answer

I agree with Joseph. Some basic controls here need to be tweaked. The pause button is located at the top and therefore, by the time I scroll back up to pause the fast-speaking narrator, it's too late. Perhaps make the letter P on our keyboards the pause button. Just a thought. Thank you.

Answer

@Inma, I've noticed the pausing and playback speed being mentioned several times in several threads, and your response from 9 months ago says the feedback is being given to the developers. Is there an update on that? They seem to be such basic requests/expectations that I'm surprised people are needing to even ask for them, let alone wait so long for them to be realized. I'm a little concerned that I just spent so much money subscribing only to learn a lot of basic features are missing.