6 ms·

> mostly language learners, teachers, and tech people, but finding people, perhaps unsurprisingly, have a lot of trouble seeing past the curse of knowledge. Re

> mostly language learners, teachers, and tech people, but finding people, perhaps unsurprisingly, have a lot of trouble seeing past the curse of knowledge. Respectfully, how do you know that you're making something people want?

solarmist 4y ago
The simplest answer is because this is what I want for studying Japanese and I wish I had when I was learning Korean at the defense language institute. For a longer answer: I also know a lot of people and am constantly meeting more who have successfully and unsuccessfully learned other languages. One problem that comes up constantly is the intermediate plateau or death march where it seems like no matter how much someone studies they never make any observable progress. To be functionally independent in another language you need to be able to recognize and understand on the order of 25k words. Parsnip is designed to target that by finding and tracking your learning of all those words and automating the work of looking up, practicing and recording those words.
- akprasad 4y ago
  > One problem that comes up [...] I agree that many language learners end up in the intermediate plateau, so there's a clear problem. But, how do you know that Parsnip is a solution these people want? > [...] by finding and tracking your learning of all those words and automating the work of looking up, practicing and recording those words. On a tech note, I'm curious what you think of lingq.com, which seems quite adjacent to what you describe here.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Again mostly personal experience and direct feedback from people saying that keeping track of vocabulary is hard. Lingq was an early inspiration, but it has many limitations (for example, it has trouble tracking word conjugations, let alone kanji in languages like Japanese) and relies almost exclusively on manual volunteer work. It provides very little leverage to users. For a purely leverage-based answer, Parsnip will save hundreds of hours of manual work per user purely by automating manual things like creating fill-in-the-blank exercises, vocabulary tracking and dictionary lookups (a conservative estimate is 70+ hours for this alone).
ipnon 4y ago
If you've every completed a Duolingo just to realize you can barely string a sentence together you will have shared my pain. Language acquisition is a long, confusing and lonely road. It's clear that OPs vision for NLP augmented language learning will be the norm one day sooner or later. Dictionaries, endless books and tutors is just too much time and money for most people.
- akprasad 4y ago
  Oh, I completely agree on the problem, and I think any technological solution to that problem will require NLP (perhaps tautologically so). But to my mind, the open questions are (a) what does that mean specifically? and (b) is a tool like that compelling enough to motivate a venture-backed startup in 2022? To expand on (a), I think a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [1] that generates interesting level-appropriate content on the fly is extremely compelling, and it's aligned pedagogically with principles like extensive reading [2]. Leaving aside its feasibility, such a primer is clearly providing NLP-augmented language learning --- but at the same time, it's a very different vision from what OP describes. More broadly, tools more aligned with communicative language teaching (CLT) would almost certainly rely on NLP without reaching too deeply for dictionaries, exercises, spaced repetition, and grammatical explanations, all of which seem to be in scope for OP. There's a lot of room here, which is why I maintain that the critical question is a simple one: is OP's specific solution to the problem something people want? [1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/The_Young_Lady%E2%80%99s_Illustrated_Primer https://notes.andymatuschak.org/The_Young_Lady%E2%80%99s_Ill... [2]: https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/ https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Huh? I don’t follow. Parsnip is a tool to highlight and surface unknown words to directly enable easier extensive reading and comprehensible input. One of the key parts of it is a reader app. Just because we can’t see the steps needed to build the primer doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create anything. It seems like you find something about my idea distasteful, but I’m having trouble understanding what, if anything, your objection is? Is it too “mechanical” of an approach to you? If so I hope you realize what I’m describing is “how the sausage is made” not what the user experience will be like. Computers are here to enhance human experiences not make us more mechanical. Also, Duolingo and quizlet are both billion dollar companies, so I believe that proves VC interest. Language learning is a nearly universal desire, but most people give up on it in their teens.

solarmist 4y ago

The simplest answer is because this is what I want for studying Japanese and I wish I had when I was learning Korean at the defense language institute. For a longer answer: I also know a lot of people and am constantly meeting more who have successfully and unsuccessfully learned other languages. One problem that comes up constantly is the intermediate plateau or death march where it seems like no matter how much someone studies they never make any observable progress. To be functionally independent in another language you need to be able to recognize and understand on the order of 25k words. Parsnip is designed to target that by finding and tracking your learning of all those words and automating the work of looking up, practicing and recording those words.

akprasad 4y ago
> One problem that comes up [...] I agree that many language learners end up in the intermediate plateau, so there's a clear problem. But, how do you know that Parsnip is a solution these people want? > [...] by finding and tracking your learning of all those words and automating the work of looking up, practicing and recording those words. On a tech note, I'm curious what you think of lingq.com, which seems quite adjacent to what you describe here.
- solarmist 4y ago
  Again mostly personal experience and direct feedback from people saying that keeping track of vocabulary is hard. Lingq was an early inspiration, but it has many limitations (for example, it has trouble tracking word conjugations, let alone kanji in languages like Japanese) and relies almost exclusively on manual volunteer work. It provides very little leverage to users. For a purely leverage-based answer, Parsnip will save hundreds of hours of manual work per user purely by automating manual things like creating fill-in-the-blank exercises, vocabulary tracking and dictionary lookups (a conservative estimate is 70+ hours for this alone).

ipnon 4y ago

If you've every completed a Duolingo just to realize you can barely string a sentence together you will have shared my pain. Language acquisition is a long, confusing and lonely road. It's clear that OPs vision for NLP augmented language learning will be the norm one day sooner or later. Dictionaries, endless books and tutors is just too much time and money for most people.

akprasad 4y ago
Oh, I completely agree on the problem, and I think any technological solution to that problem will require NLP (perhaps tautologically so). But to my mind, the open questions are (a) what does that mean specifically? and (b) is a tool like that compelling enough to motivate a venture-backed startup in 2022? To expand on (a), I think a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [1] that generates interesting level-appropriate content on the fly is extremely compelling, and it's aligned pedagogically with principles like extensive reading [2]. Leaving aside its feasibility, such a primer is clearly providing NLP-augmented language learning --- but at the same time, it's a very different vision from what OP describes. More broadly, tools more aligned with communicative language teaching (CLT) would almost certainly rely on NLP without reaching too deeply for dictionaries, exercises, spaced repetition, and grammatical explanations, all of which seem to be in scope for OP. There's a lot of room here, which is why I maintain that the critical question is a simple one: is OP's specific solution to the problem something people want? [1]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/The_Young_Lady%E2%80%99s_Illustrated_Primer https://notes.andymatuschak.org/The_Young_Lady%E2%80%99s_Ill... [2]: https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/ https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/
- solarmist 4y ago
  Huh? I don’t follow. Parsnip is a tool to highlight and surface unknown words to directly enable easier extensive reading and comprehensible input. One of the key parts of it is a reader app. Just because we can’t see the steps needed to build the primer doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create anything. It seems like you find something about my idea distasteful, but I’m having trouble understanding what, if anything, your objection is? Is it too “mechanical” of an approach to you? If so I hope you realize what I’m describing is “how the sausage is made” not what the user experience will be like. Computers are here to enhance human experiences not make us more mechanical. Also, Duolingo and quizlet are both billion dollar companies, so I believe that proves VC interest. Language learning is a nearly universal desire, but most people give up on it in their teens.