Dear our beloved eJOY learners,
We’ve just gone through the second year of Covid-19, 2021 — a long year of upheaval and delay. Yet, eJOY believes that these ups and downs provide valuable opportunities to spend time for ourselves: time for self-reflection, time to learn many useful skills and knowledge. With that in mind, we invite you to listen to the development journey of eJOY over the past year – small successes and inspiring stories of our own learners.
Inspirational story
Learning is a lifelong journey, it never ends when we graduate from schools or universities. The President of Lac Hong University, Dr. Lam Thanh Hien, and his story of learning English with eJOY app will give us a new perspective on the journey of lifelong learning, and this story was chosen by eJOY as the inspirational story of the year.
On a daily basis, he tends to set a daily goal of studying English to accomplish 6000 points on the eJOY app, and try to spend 15 minutes in the morning earning 2000 points, the remaining points will be divided equally to study in the afternoon and evening. So he always ensures that he will interact with English several times a day.
That’s it, teachers – who are always assumed that there is no need to cultivate regular English – still persevere to try every day to improve their knowledge. We hope that the story of Dr. Lam Thanh Hien will inspire you toward the lifelong learning spirit, not only in English but also in other knowledge or skills.
Read more about the story of Dr. Lam Thanh Hien
Some numbers to mark the end of 2021
By the end of 2021, total eJOY learners passed 1 million. Nearly 400,000 of us are using eJOY every week as a tool to help us immerse ourselves in the English world.
Every day, thousands of learners are studying with fun to maintain their learning streaks. 200 of us surpass 3-month streaks, which means there are 200 learners who are learning English on eJOY for more than 90 days in a row. And the rock star is the one who has been learning on eJOY for 1057 consecutive days, almost 3 years with no day off.
Important updates in 2021
eJOY English App
At the beginning of 2021, we made a plan to innovate the app however the update required us to change the whole core engine which took us longer than planned to launch the new app as promised. We’re truly sorry for this delay and we’re working hard to make it happen in the quarter I of 2022. Please keep on reading for further information about this.
Despite the delay, we still made several updates to the app as below:
- Offline Dictionary: Look up words when watching a video and learn even without an Internet connection.
- Auto Translate: Watching the video in landscape mode allows auto-translate feature (the yellow sentence above the screen).
- Picture In Picture: Continue to watch a video on a small screen even though you exit to another screen.
GlotDojo App – Multilingual learning app
GlotDojo is an app that helps you learn 19 different languages from your favorite videos with those specific features such as translating video subtitles, watching with bilingual subtitles, looking up words, saving words quickly, and reviewing with the well-known spaced repetition algorithm. What’s more, this app syncs with GlotDojo Extension.!!!
PDF Translator
Catering for PDF’s regular users, PDF Translator helps users look up words and translate on PDF files in a click away on your laptop. Here are some key features, just to name a few:
- Looking up words, translate paragraphs on PDF files with just a click.
- Listening to PDF files with Audio-Reader when you are “lazy” to read.
- Translating the word in a mouse click.
At the end of 2021, we launched two new English learning tools, Video Translator and Phonetic Transcription.
Video Translator – Translate and Edit Video subtitles
This tool is to upload your own video with subtitles and edit the subtitles if needed. If you already have some video files, why not give it a try and practice listening, dictation, and self-editing subtitles all at once?
Phonetics Transcription
If you have a script and you want to practice speaking it fluently, you’d better try phonetics transcription. All you need to do is copy and paste your text to the box, hit enter and there you go. You can see the phonetics of the text in IPA format or phonetics respelling format.
If you are at the intermediate level, just some words are challenging to you, now try to toggle off the “Showing all phonetic scripts” and click on difficult words. We hope this tool will help you practice speaking with great ease.
Try Phonetics Transcription for free
Glotdojo Extension – Capture Look Up Feature
Many people have trouble using Glotdojo extension to look up words when subtitles are hardcoded in the videos. The Capture Look Up feature will resolve this issue. No need to transfer the tab to check the dictionary, just turn on the Capture Look Up feature to capture the text area you want to check, then you’ll get the translations. You can save the captured image and its OCR text to your list so that you can review it at any time.
This feature does cost a bit to get the translation API from Google. That’s why it’s still under our Beta version and available for Glot Premium Add-on buyers (Chinese & Japanese dictionary add-ons).
Download GlotDojo Extension for free
New Year Plan 2022
2021 has been a very special year for eJOY as we spent most of our time evaluating and developing our learning philosophy and product development. Thanks to your reviews and feedback, we have come up with many great ideas to upgrade our products. And we hope the Beta version will be available in QI 2022.
New guided courses
For the first time, eJOY offers guided courses with various games. You can choose a learning path that meets your needs based on language level and your interests.
2 apps become 1
Instead of downloading and using two apps eJOY App and eJOY Reader separately, you can experience the features of both apps on eJOY New App. You don’t have to be worried about the app you are using now. We still keep running the 2 existing apps together with the new app. However, in order to use the new app, you will need to create a new account. These accounts do not link to each other. This is to ensure that the new app won’t impact your existing account.
Listening flashcard
You told us that you want to have more ways to review your vocabulary, especially a lazy mode. And here we go the Listening flashcard which will go through your vocabulary list by reading out loud your new words. Then you can review your vocab list while jogging, walking to work, or even cooking.
And more
There are many other major updates relating to video watching with dual subtitles, spaced repetition algorithm, and progress tracking that we want to keep under wraps till the launch day. We really appreciate your continued support on the new app and other updates we plan to implement on eJOY extension and GlotDojo this year.
Happy New Year 2022
eJOY Team wishes you a happy and prosperous new year. Wishing you good health, great bravery and perseverance – long strides in your English learning path. And we hope that we can accompany you on your 2022 learning journey.
If you are considering upgrading your account to PRO, don’t miss out our $20 off voucher as a lucky gift for the new year 2022. It’s a limited-time offer. Hurry up!