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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 l

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).

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).