to rivet is to join things together. to be riveted by something is to be completely engrossed by it.
rivetr aims to join your language learning and your everyday life together and have you completely engrossed by the language so that soon enough, it's no longer foreign
THE PROBLEM: Without a doubt, the best way to learn a language is by immersion. Using the language as often as possible and listening to the language daily whether through music, television, or good ol' conversation with a native speaker. Learning grammar and drilling vocabulary is certainly helpful and often necessary, but there's nothing like immersion to improve your fluency but it's not always possible to use a foreign language every day in real life. This is where Rivetr can help.
WHAT RIVETR DOES FOR YOU: It's like twitter -- but for language learners alike. It doesn't teach you a language in itself, but it aids your learning by normalizing your usage of the language, by bringing it into your daily life. We tweet things in our native language spontaneously whenever we think of something funny, cool, whatever -- so why not do that in a foreign language directly to a community also trying to learn the same language, or even better, is a native speaker? When you post things, the community can proofread and make corrections, or if your grammar and spelling is awesome? Well, it's just like twitter, so they can react to your post however they want (reply, favorite). And don't you feel all left out now, you can do all of that too. Once you join rivetr, you're a part of the community as well.
FRONTEND: AngularJS, Node/Express, Angular-Scroll, Transltr, HTML/SCSS
BACKEND: Ruby on Rails, POSTGRESQL
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As a user, I will be able to...
- Create a personal account, then be able to edit and delete it whenever
- See my profile with all my posts and see other people's profile as well
- Follow other people for my personalized timeline
- Create short posts (200/250 char limit, maybe?) and delete them (but cannot edit)
- Attach photos to my posts
- Can like other user's posts and see them in my favorites
- Private message other users in real time
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As a user learning a language, this app will be useful because I can...
- Specify what language I am currently learning and what language I can help others with when I create or edit my account
- Filter users/posts by those same specifications
- Correct people's posts/private messages (grammar/spelling/vocab) and explain what was wrong/right (thus, other users can do this to my posts and I can learn through that)
- Use an in-app translator to translate something before I post it or to translate someone else's tweets
- With a disclaimer that the translator is NOT very accurate and is best used only for looking up words/super short phrases