Inspiration
Language and culture are intertwined, learning a new language also exposes one to a new culture. As one becomes more fluent in a language, he/she also learns more about the culture. And education is the first step to developing empathy, appreciation, and respect for a culture. In addition, fluency enables more effective communication, resolving misunderstandings and creating a mutual respect. This is our initiative starting this project: through a quite fun (personal opinion from experience learning French) learning process, one can open themselves to something new, embrace its differences, and "bridge" the gap between different cultures. .
What it does
Our website includes 10 simple and useful phrases from each language (we were only able to get through four). We provided romanizations for languages written with characters so readers can learn to pronounce the words. We also added audio, though only to the Chinese phrases as that's the only language we speak fluently. On our web page, we have a navigation bar with a home button that links to our homepage and a drop down menu that allows users to switch between different language pages.
How we built it
We built this project using HTML and CSS. After deciding that we were going to make a website about languages, we quickly sketched out the layout for our homepage and language pages. With all the stuff ready, we dived straight into coding.
Challenges we ran into
We definitely had lots of challenges, technical ones but also disagreements and miscommunication. Since we weren't side by side, transmitting our ideas to each other was definitely slower and not very effective compared to talking face to face, but with patience (and the help of modern technology) we solved those problems quickly. Challenges regarding codes were more complicated. Some problems (like making our navigation bar stick, getting rid of unnecessary spaces between our buttons, and adding audios) we were able to fix with some research. When that didn't work, we resorted to guess and check and sort of just gave our best bet to our luck, and obviously, we still have small bugs that we couldn't quite figure out. Yet, although this website is far from perfect (actually I would describe it as "incredibly flawed"), it's a project our team takes pride in, from start to finish we constantly stepped outside our comfort zone to strive to accomplish more difficult tasks.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is truly proud of every aspect of our project, from the responsive buttons we got right the first try, to our drop bar and sticky navigation bar that took nearly a whole day to yet perfect, to the audio recordings we had to record ourselves. We are both beginner and every step along this project was a first step, so even if the steps itself weren't pretty enough for us to call it something we're "proud of", we still take pride in our action of taking those steps and accepting the challenges.
What we learned
Other than gaining a more full understanding about the process of building a website from scratch, how HTML elements work and styling with CSS. The most important thing we learned is how it feels to accomplish something that when you started, you held serious doubts about, to make possible, something you thought was impossible.
What's next for Fluency Everywhere
As we reached each milestone of this project and completed a task, new ideas kept popping up in our heads. With limited time, we definitely had to prioritize and make adjustments. Currently we are thinking of expanding our community by creating a "join us" form to allow people who want to contribute to our purpose to share their knowledge of languages by providing us with more phrases or audios. Through this process, we will expand the knowledge base of the website, thus widening the bridge to close the culture gap.
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