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Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

• somenameforme 3y ago
  Not to nitpick, but I found this is a bit ironic: "Phrasing works by finding you two documents, in two different languages, and connecting them sentence by sentence with eachother. While we're add it, we clean things up, score them, and analyze their relevance in each language."
  • barrell 3y ago
    haha yeah, maybe I should at english to my list of languages ;P
• metayrnc 3y ago
  I don’t know where the translations are coming from, but the quality of the Turkish/English translation was lacking. Unfortunately, It does not inspire enough confidence for me to use this tool.
  • barrell 3y ago
    The demo article only had a couple translations, so we auto-translated some missing ones. Sorry the Turkish one isn't great! Most of the app we try to encourage you to use professionally translated works to learn whichever language you're studying, so try to do as we say not as we do :D
    • clbrmbr 3y ago
      As I’ve commented elsewhere, to the extent you are using machine translation: note that GPT is bad at translation to languages other than English. Telltale sign is not declining for gender. I saw this a lot with GPT4’s Polish. Better to use one of the standard translation services.
  • Mordisquitos 3y ago
    The same is the case for the "Spanish" example, which is only barely understandable and lacks basic grammatical gender concordance: > Una carrera comparativamente segura y próspera con algún prestigio básico automático es peligrosamente tentador para alguien joven, que no ha pensado mucho sobre lo que le gusta realmente. If that's what's being presented for the world's 2nd most spoken native language and 4th most spoken overall, I shudder to think what the ostensible "Polish" equivalent phrasing is like: > Porównawczo bezpieczna i dostatnia kariera z pewnym automatycznym prestiżem jest niebezpiecznie kusząca dla młodej osoby, która nie zastanawiała się zbytnio nad tym, co naprawdę lubi.
    • barrell 3y ago
      Hmmm we assumed that the translations for the Paul Graham essays would have been properly translated. Someone else pointed out a French issue earlier, both the French and Spanish examples were taken from their 'official' translation. Now I'm questioning everything. Unless we seriously messed up a copy and paste, it's possible we just used a bad source. It is a bring-your-own materials type of app, so if you bring an authentically translated work, you avoid this problem. We try not to do any translation ourselves (although we of course allow it for convenience if you choose it)
• dan-g 3y ago
  Hi there! I’m getting an “Email rate limit exceeded” error when I try to register, just FYI.
  • barrell 3y ago
    Supabase has been having issues all day, it's possible now their auth is down :') we haven't received enough traffic to bring it down yet. EDIT: was able to confirm that my supabase instance can't connect to the auth service at the moment. 99% uptime but of course the 1% downtime is when you launch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• apwell23 3y ago
  I don't understand what this is. This landing page actually made me annoyed :) . I doubt you will get many conversions based on current landing page. > Try clicking around on some of the words below - and make sure to give the audio a listen! OP I clicked on the text and bunch of tags popped up. I wasn't sure what those tags are or what I am supposed to do after that.
  • IanCal 3y ago
    Please be kind. That doesn't stop you being critical, but try and be kind and more helpful. What's confusing? It's clearly a language learning app, with various features that it seems like the landing page leads you through. The HN link is to the playground, which also does explain things. Where are you getting stuck? Perhaps these may help OP improve the page. edit - I see the comment has been updated to be softened, which I think is a good choice.
    • apwell23 3y ago
      You are right. I added some feedback for OP about where I got stuck.
  • barrell 3y ago
    We're working on it constantly! We just released the home page last week and we've been collecting feedback on it. If you have any lingering questions you're left with after seeing the home page, please let us know. That way we can add those to a list of questions we're trying to get sure get answered in any future updates!
  • chaxor 3y ago
    It's a place to learn languages. Like Rust or Go. :)
  • barrell 3y ago
    It's worth mentioning that this is a playground specifically for Show HN (technically I don't think you're just supposed to post landing pages for private products). The home page is a bit more 'standard'. Perhaps that's clearer for you? Cleaning up the grammatical information to make it a bit less information dense is definitely on our todo list though.
• sgc 3y ago
  Two unrelated items: I had very good results many years ago polishing the last steps of my French while in France. My tutor used very novel and interesting short articles, one example was a short article about shrimp found in a cave with no light. At the time this was a novel bit of information and quite interesting on its own. I think an effort to find novel and educational information to learn from is an effort well worth the time. Please add Albanian. I should learn this language but I am not motivated enough. I would definitely give your tool a proper test run.
  • barrell 3y ago
    We will look into Albanian! We have some ideas on how to remove the language restrictions sometime this year. When it comes to educational content, one of the things I'm most excited for is to have the stuff I'm learning hooked up into an SRS _and_ in another language. Not only will I remember things better because I'm learning it in another language, but I'll learn the other language better because I'm interested in the content. Although I'm most interested in turning stories into language learning content. Instead of 'Jack was in the park in summer'', something like "John Snow stood on the wall in winter" I would expect to elad to much stronger memories.
    • clbrmbr 3y ago
      > turning stories into language learning content Great idea. It could be simple cloze deletion from the content pasted in, or are you thinking to use AI to create simplified expressions with similar semantics?
    • sgc 3y ago
      There will be two broad types of people: those with interest in fiction, and those who prefer non-fiction. The more you can offer something from each group, and from a few different genres / areas in those subgroups, the more people will be able to find their sweet spot. For extra credit, analyze which subjects each person is learning the best from, and give them more of that. Eventually you should be able to find patterns and know when to switch things up by finding each person's learning cadences... romance, romance, chemistry, nature, romance, etc. Out of curiosity I tried chatGPT with a simple: "please give me a list of ten interesting facts about the life of polar bears". It was ok. I got better results with: "can you rewrite that list, providing more unique, novel facts about polar bears? Things most people would not know?"
• aconst 3y ago
  In the landing page I could see this for French : "Toujours produire" découvrira le métier de ta vie de la même façon que l'eau, aidée par la gravité, trouve le trou dans ton toit. If you replace the first two words by "tu", and correct a minor mistake in the third one (add a "s" at the end), it has a meaning but otherwise not. I guess we cannot trust it to learn a language then.
  • barrell 3y ago
    I believe that came from the official translation for paul graham's essay, but their site is down now and I can't confirm: https://penelope.jdsfriends.com/DWYL_francais.htm https://penelope.jdsfriends.com/DWYL_francais.htm Not saying it's correct, but it's definitely only going to be as good as it's inputs. If we gave it a bad translation, that's on us! Sorry
    • vintermann 3y ago
      If you do any sort of automatic attempts to discover parallel texts (and I can't understand how you can support "any show" otherwise), you're going to run into the problem of terrible translations, most of them made with machines.
      • addandsubtract 3y ago
        You're also going to get figurative translations instead of literal ones.
    • aconst 3y ago
      Sorry, I had not seen the english version it was the translation for. Both French and English version look awkward, they must be read in context ^^;
  • zansara 3y ago
    I'm learning French too but I can't see the mistakes you're pointing out... What would be the correct sentence?
• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Nice work, good application of GPT to language learning and FSRS is definitely the new standard too I built something similar, Manabi Reader, currently only for Japanese on iOS/macOS but expanding to more languages shortly. I built it as a native app so that it behaves like a web browser - no sharing your data with providers, offline friendly, no worry about what copyrighted material users might consume. It tracks the words and kanji you read and learn, showing your incremental progress against JLPT levels. I’ve built an AI app for BYOK OpenAI plus local LLMs that I’m integrating into Manabi Reader as a free feature to add these kind of LLM features It has a flashcard app or lets you mine expressions directly into Anki https://reader.manabi.io https://reader.manabi.io
  • barrell 3y ago
    Hey thanks for the kind words! I have to also give you props back - Manabi reader is awesome, I've known the project for a while.
• vintermann 3y ago
  Don't you worry that the ways of language acquisition that work for ultra-polyglots would necessarily work for regular people?
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Why? Everyone acquires language the same way.
    • vintermann 3y ago
      Their first one, maybe. But I've seen first-hand how much people vary in what they manage to learn from classes.
      • thaumasiotes 3y ago
        Well, there's not that much variation. People don't learn much from classes. And you'll note that "what works for polyglots" isn't classes.
  • barrell 3y ago
    Depends on the context - yes, I do worry that language acquisition will not work for everyone in it's normal form. It takes an intense love for languages to diligently put in the work and go through the 'trough of sorrow' and trust the process. Heck, I love languages, and I've never had the motivation to open up a subtitle track and go through it and make flashcards. I do not worry that language acquisition will not work for everyone if we can make it accessible enough though. Blame the tools (Phrasing included if you want), not the learner!
• mtalantikite 3y ago
  Congrats on the launch! As of now it feels like your target audience, or at least those that would understand what this might be, are people that probably have already spent a lot of time in language learning communities and understand some of what you're going for. For instance, I see "Shadowing" on one of the pages as a feature, which, if I wasn't aware of Alexander Arguelles' work, I'd have no idea what this was. Same with a lot of this parallel text stuff, if I didn't own Assimil courses I might not know that having parallel texts is a powerful way of learning. I think it could be helpful to break down how this would work more clearly for people that might not have much background in these sorts of methods. I'd be really interested in trying this out if you had Bengali as a language option. It's a notoriously underrepresented language by language learning publishers, despite being the 6th most spoken language in the world [1] with a very rich, 1000+ year history of poetry and a people that literally fought a war in some part for their language [2]. Again, congrats on the launch -- now comes the hard part! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement
  • barrell 3y ago
    Hey, thanks so much for the kind words! Our target audience is definitely polyglots/advanced learners at the moment - mostly just due to time. We'll definitely get to the point where everything is explained - the only thing we're lacking atm is time :) We've got some ideas to remove the limit on languages at some point this year. In the meantime I wonder if it's possible to use Hindi or Kannada TTS with Bengali. I'd be happy to work with you to try and get it working! It's very important for us to eventually support all languages.
• clbrmbr 3y ago
  I look forward to giving user feedback when I’m able to signup. > our Humane Spaced repeition system. Based off of the popular FSRS, our Spaced Repeition System will adapt to your review style. Take a few weeks off? No problem. Want to study ahead one day? No problem. Took a 2 year vacation? We're jealous, but we've got you covered. I really resonate with this. I find that after a long break, I have forgotten a lot less than Anki’s algorithm believes. Is there some reasonably scientific reference for this? I mean, I’d be interested to read someone’s study or theories here.
  • steve1977 3y ago
    Well for one thing, Anki is using an ancient SuperMemo algorithm. I wouldn’t take Anki as a benchmark in terms of spaced repetition effectiveness.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      anki doesn't use the ancient sm algo anymore anki uses fsrs but afaik it still "punishes" you for taking breaks
      • rsanek 3y ago
        It does still use SM2 by default -- you have to turn on FSRS manually. https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs
      • jarrett-ye 3y ago
        You can set easy days via the FSRS4Anki Helper add-on: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/759844606 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/759844606 And it also supports to postpone your backlog.
      • steve1977 3y ago
        As others pointed out, SM-2 is apparently still the default. FSRS would indeed be more interesting, as it seems to be heavily “inspired” by SM-18.
  • 3y ago
• boerseth 3y ago
  > The hardest part about learning a language is knowing what to learn. I disagree with this. The hardest part about learning a language is finding content and resources in the target language that are both engaging and comprehensible at your current level. It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient. The parts of the language you need to learn will reveal themselves to you through your interaction with it. And then, either your brain will figure it out intuitively, or you'll be able to look things up if they remain a mystery. Perhaps being equipped with a base set of phrases will increase your range in the very beginning, but that does involve offloading a lot of comprehension work to your brain's CPU, rather than letting it be handled by your brain's in-built language processor GPU. I'm suspicious about any such strategy for language learning. Context clues that accompany the language input are a much more powerful way to make language comprehensible, compared to memorizing phrases and adding strain to your already busy brain.
  • barrell 3y ago
    I'm not sure we entirely disagree. The idea here is to load your RAM with enough information so you can go and interact with the language, and you have enough critical 'hooks' to start to boot up your GPU. Then once you've done that, you should have some good memories that you can start to commit to long term storage, should you choose (did I go too far with the computer analogies? I feel like it broke down). Either way, I think we say in several places, no app is going to replace the learning that happens from interacting with the content. _That's_ where you actually learn. Our sole purpose is to get you to be able to interact with it as fast as possible, with as little gymnastics as possible.
    • boerseth 3y ago
      No, I think you're doing good with that analogy still. My own spitball was half baked anyway. To some extent, conscious consideration of phrases and meanings of things can and do happen, but learning on it as the primary source for comprehension is so painful. And it's what we do in most grammar-heavy courses, and strategies based on memorizing phrases.
• docorc 3y ago
  Can you add Tamil as well, it’s one of the oldest Indian Languages much like Sanskrit and has millions of Tamil Speaker spread all across South East Asia and has big Bollywood industry with lots of shows. Recently been trying to find a good app for my kids and Tamil is always missing from most language apps.
  • barrell 3y ago
    We support Tamil :) I don't think we have any voices added for Tamil, but it's possible that a Tamil speaker voice clone in Hindi could be sufficient. Would love to try!
• wmil 3y ago
  `env.js` is returning html for me and thus throwing an error. Is it working for everyone else? Is this a cloudflare config problem?
  • barrell 3y ago
    hahaha this is a debugging trick we use to be able to run production builds locally through proxy servers :) is it causing issues for you (besides logging a 404)?
    • wmil 3y ago
      The phrases weren't loading for me and it was the most obvious problem. They are working now.
• strongly-typed 3y ago
  I recognize this comment has little to do with this post, but as a fellow obscure language aficionado, I just wanted to recommend probably most obscure language I’m legitimately interested in called Modern Indo European. It’s a conlang that takes the reconstructed Proto Indo European and fills in the missing parts to turn it into a usable language. That’s all, just wanted to give them a shoutout. ——— I’m also an avid language learner myself, and I feel like what has worked for me has been to study a wide range of words with Anki, but then also try to use them in conversation. Often times I wouldn’t remember the words I studied, but it would be “on the tip of my tongue”. Then the speaker would fill in the word, and from then on I would never forget the word. Finally, I think you guys are also headed in the right direction with the idea of “expression”, because I feel it is often difficult to map words 1 to 1 with a language you already know. Oftentimes the expression will be said differently “my name is” vs “to me the name is”. The idea is to capture a unit of meaning in a set expression and to be able to combine the expressions to communicate.
  • dang 3y ago
    This sounds like a good topic for an HN submission! what's the best article about it?
• hld 3y ago
  Hi! I would love to try this. I am currently on my 7th language so I am always excited to find language learning apps. So far none of them has beaten a good old language course and consuming media in the language. Maybe the website has received a bit too much love but I am trying to search for a TV show and the UI is not reacting at all (I entered "How I Met Your Mother" in the textbox below "How to do what you love" on the playground page). A bit of a strange question I have is who created the pictures for your updates page? The style reminds me of Raycast marketing material which I find incredibly beautiful. I really like the optics, is there a name for this style? All the best!
  • barrell 3y ago
    Hey! So the search box is part of a demo of an article we aligned. For the Playground, we just have some example content to show how it works (we wanted to share to HN but we didn't want to do so without giving people something to play with). We could have made that more clear. In the actual application, you're correct, you just type in the show name and it will look it up for you. That's just not this page :) With regards to the design, I think it's been dubbed 'Aurora UI'. We have a large figma files with dozens of similar sources, I think raycast is one of them haha
• The_Colonel 3y ago
  The page doesn't make a good job communicating what it offers. There's a lot of unimportant fluff, generic "we're the best", but I didn't really understand what the app offers beyond showing the same phrase in multiple languages.
  • barrell 3y ago
    Try https://phrasing.app/ https://phrasing.app/ The /playground link I posted to HN was meant to give HN something to click around on. The root index page is meant to be the primary marketing materials.
• PhilippGille 3y ago
  Could there be a naming conflict between your phrasing.app, and phrase.com, a translation management tool?
• ESMP 3y ago
  I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks. With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律 Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; 子供たちが「自分はこの人たちとは違う。 自分はこの世界に向いていない」と思ったとしても彼らを責められまい。
  • barrell 3y ago
    Honestly, I would not recommend it for Japanese/Chinese atm. We're aware the quality there is really not good. We'll have to spend a couple months dedicated to these languages specifically to clean them up. Still, we don't want to stop our users from learning any language with it, even if it's not well supported. But I've been very transparent with any of our beta testers that Chinese/Japanese are not going to be a great experience (yet!)
    • pech0rin 3y ago
      I'm also an advanced Japanese learner and find this disappointing. It would be great if your marketing materials said which languages you support and which you don't. It says "learn any language", but I see a lot of comments in here about oh it doesn't work well with this or that language. It makes sense to focus yourself on the languages that you actually do support. Over promise and under deliver is not the way to build trust or a good product.
      • barrell 3y ago
        To clarify, there’s nothing stopping you from learning Japanese with it. Almost all of our beta testers are polyglots, studying 5+ languages, most of them studying at least Japanese or Chinese. It’s just that the alignments don’t work well with Hanzi/Kanji - the app itself still function fine, just with a bit more manual effort We’ve made sure to be transparent with any of our beta testers about the limitations. We also agree that more docs would be better, and they will be coming. We been discussing internally a way to grade languages… but any conversation we’ve had in that area ends up in the same place: we need users to help us grade the languages. We very specifically do not want to focus in on just a couple languages. There are hundreds of tools out there dedicated to individual languages, and we don’t feel we have anything unique to contribute there. Sorry if it came across disingenuous! That was not our intention. As we work with beta testers, and learned of all these languages, we will develop more documentation around the precise limits :)
• hnbad 3y ago
  Given the prominent mentions of OpenAI I'm going to guess this doesn't use actual human translators but instead relies on machine translations using OpenAI? This is literally what created a drastic decrease in the overall quality of Duolingo. I wouldn't trust an app like this if it's relying on machine translations, AI or not. Especially when it comes to learning phrases and real-world examples. Translation is hard. Machine translation is even harder. Machine translation for languages with limited sample sizes (e.g. "Sanskrit an Hawaiian") is nearly impossible. The only way to make this thing pass an even remotely reasonable bar for quality would be to hire humans to train it but at the rates required to keep this thing profitable that borders on exploitation.
  • barrell 3y ago
    Ideally we're not creating any of the translations ourselves - although of course we support machine translation. Our goal is to turn any native (or professionally translated) material into language learning materials. We also have lots of ideas for 'Humans in the loop', verification, etc. But while we use AI for _a lot_ of things, we're trying to stay as far away from 'generate some Sanskrit' or 'translate <english text> to Sanksrit'
• chefandy 3y ago
  Edit: nm
  • barrell 3y ago
    I'm not sure if this is clear, but this is just a playground for Hacker News? The main homepage can be found at the root URL https://phrasing.app/ https://phrasing.app/ That being said, we've done exactly this, polished the landing page, and are literally working our way through all our friends and family again to refine it again. Another couple rounds and I think we might make it all clear! :D Indeed none of us are marketers so we're learning as we go :) If you look at the waybackmachine though I think it's definitely trending in the right direction!
    • chefandy 3y ago
      ok-- It was not clear to me. You might want to put a big print bit at the top of the page.
      • barrell 3y ago
        just did :)
• dgan 3y ago
  French version looks wierd. '"Toujours produire" découvrira le métier de ta vie...' Huh? lol
• aredox 3y ago
  The French example is horrible. Barely sensical, very weird, absolutely not what a native person would write nor say. It looks like something someone who barely speaks French would produce.
  • raitom 3y ago
    Agree. As a native speaker, I found these examples to be weird at best. No way any native would write or speak like that.
    • barrell 3y ago
      When we built this demo we figured the official translations would be well translated, apparently they are not. Some people elsewhere in the comments are saying it's just a weird English sentence so it has a weird French sentence. My French is no good enough to critique on it's nativeness though
      • aredox 3y ago
        ""Toujours faire quelque chose" vous amènera à trouver le travail de votre vie de la même façon que la gravité amène l'eau jusqu'au trou dans votre toit." (Paul Graham is a very poor writer, and his image doesn't mean much to Europeans, who don't live much in individual, shoddily-made houses the way Americans do)
• yellow_lead 3y ago
  I thought the site was down, but it actually just loads very slowly (5+ seconds) on Firefox mobile. (The main page)
• chankstein38 3y ago
  So what does it actually do to youtube videos? The landing page doesn't cover this. Should I expect that the video I watch will be in my target language now? As in, it'll be dubbed in the new language? That'd be super useful but I'm unclear and I'm not paying $10 to find out. A time-limited example or something similar would be really useful. Maybe just one that you pick. Whatever it may be, I'd love to see how it actually works before paying money for it. Assuming it dubs videos, how does it handle multiple speakers?
  • barrell 3y ago
    We're definitely going to get there! For what it's worth, nobody has been signed on yet without receiving a tour and demonstration of the product, and nor would I expect anyone to pay money without having seen the product. Sometime this week or next we will work on recording videos of the whole experience, and making them available. Then another thing to do this quarter is automatic payments, payment portals, trials, etc. We didn't think we should delay 'launching' any longer though.
    • chankstein38 3y ago
      Sounds great! I'm excited to see what y'all end up having to offer! For what it's worth, if you can pull off auto-dubbing in the language I choose in a natural way I'd be on board 100%
• kmarc 3y ago
  I looked at some of the Hungarian translations and some are way off or even unrelated to the English version. I would have thought a year or two ago that this is simply a database lookup / array indexing problem, or is this something that qualifies as an LLM hallucinating? The former issue could be confidently resolved in a matter of hours, the latter makes me completely distrust the whole project. I do like the UX tho, and find it a good idea that you created a HN-related landing page. Seems like a good amount of work went into this, congrats!
• rurban 3y ago
  I cannot even enter my email address, on Android/firefox
• gamerDude 3y ago
  Trying to sign up and getting an "Email rate limit exceeded" error. Hopefully you see this and can keep your user sign ups flowing!
• canadiantim 3y ago
  wow I love the idea of pre-learning the important words in a show then watching it to kinda cement it in. Really cool.
• TurkishPoptart 3y ago
  I'd like to demo this. Is it possible at the moment?
• wackget 3y ago
  The regular homepage is super laggy for me. It also doesn't explain what the product actually is. For example, I clicked on "TV shows" and it says: > Just search for your favorites > You type in the name of the TV show you want to watch, and we'll do the heavy lifting. With over one million episodes at your fingertips, we've got you covered. So... is this app a media streaming service? Does it host all this content or does it require me to pay for it? Is it legal? How does this help me learn languages - will it provide subtitles? Spoken audio dubbing? Are these AI-generated or does it fetch from existing translation resources? If it's AI-generated I cannot possibly see how it'll be accurate. Way too many questions.
  • barrell 3y ago
    I mean, I'm sorry your experience wasn't great. But this is fantastic feedback, so thank you for that. We're working on an FAQ section, we'll make sure these are all answered there. If you were genuinely asking here, I'm also happy to go through each point individually. Although the 2 most important things: yes everything is legal, no we try to stay away from AI generation for the core product (although we allow it of course)
• nescioquid 3y ago
  The landing page says the app was built by working closely with "hyperpolyglots" which are described as "people who speak 15+ languages". For these purposes, what does "speaking" a language actually mean. Fluency? A1 level? Did the Assimil course? Bluntly: are "hyperpolygots" really just beginners in 15+ languages? Why would I want to use an app that caters to them? The claim seems to be: do what hyperpolyglots do to learn a language. But do these people actually learn the target language and if so, to what level?
• filleduchaos 3y ago
  "Every language" sounds like a massive stretch. Then again I come from a country of 200+ different languages, so maybe my expectations are a tad higher than most. Unfortunately, given the reliance on machine translations, I don't expect it to be a useful learning tool for most of those languages any time soon. As an aside I'm curious about your voices, especially for highly tonal languages like Yoruba that also don't necessarily have a lot of easily trainable material available.
  • barrell 3y ago
    While we offer people the ability to do machine translations, there's absolutely no reliance on them. We actively advise against using machine translations when onboarding new users It's a good point about the "every language" part. That's really the goal of the project - we've been adding about 20 languages a month since we started, and don't plan to stop until we support every language. However we're not there yet, give us a few more months to live up to that ;) We have some ideas for languages that don't have widely available TTS, but we're not ready to share anything quite yet.
    • jamager 3y ago
      > don't plan to stop until we support every language. However we're not there yet, give us a few more months to live up to that You know there are about 7000 languages in the world, right? Most of them with 0 or near 0 presence on the internet.
      • barrell 3y ago
        Yes! I mean, we won't supply the content for all 7,000 languages, but we can make the core learning process and core pipeline language agnostic, so you could learn any language. With the exception of sign languages of course, as those will require their own processes and pipelines.
    • filleduchaos 3y ago
      Ah! To be clear I was going off of other comments, and also omitted some of the steps in my logic. Basically I mean that the project seems to rely on third-party-sourced translations of material which are themselves often machine-translated, and that support for new languages seems to be added through machine translation (though I suppose these days we call it AI instead). To be clear this is as opposed to something like Duolingo, which hires humans to translate its available material.
• gxonatano 3y ago
  Impressive project, but the tagline says "learn every language," and yet there are some very glaring omissions. Just a few off the top of my head: Haitian Creole, Breton, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Scots, and Yoruba. But probably the biggest omission is Esperanto, the world's most popular auxiliary language, which is often used as a bridge to other languages. If you learn Esperanto as your first foreign language, it's much easier to learn other languages, so it should be front-and-center in any language learning app.
  • barrell 3y ago
    Heh yeah that was just brought to my attention. It's kind of always been the mission of the project, and what we've been building internally. We've been adding 20 languages a month since we started, and we're not planning on stopping anytime soon - but indeed there are a lot of language missing at the moment. By the time we're out of beta we will support every language, give us a couple months to make good on that headline!
• ricardobeat 3y ago
  Looks really interesting, unfortunately your sign up page is throwing a “Email rate limit exceeded” error, and the e-mail field is painfully slow to type in (iPhone), guessing some kind of React state recursion gone wrong.
  • mderazon 3y ago
    Same on Android. The UI on that page is very sluggish
• bravura 3y ago
  I want to try this, but "reserve a spot" is giving: "Email rate limit exceeded"
• rickcarlino 3y ago
  I’ve been building a hobby project with (from what I am reading on your landing page) identical goals but on a smaller scale. Please reach out if you ever want to talk. I’m pretty easy to find. https://github.com/RickCarlino/KoalaSRS https://github.com/RickCarlino/KoalaSRS
• abanayev 3y ago
  Didn’t seem to work. “Load failed” when I entered my email address. Then “email rate limit exceeded” when I tried again
• sebnun 3y ago
  This looks really nice, I built something similar, mostly focused on podcasts now: https://www.langturbo.com https://www.langturbo.com I built something more complex before, that had YouTube content, AI shadowing tests, some built in SRS, but I chose to focus on the most important things first. I actually started building my app due to the frustration of not finding any "intermediate level" apps. Good to see more options out there. Good luck.
• XCSme 3y ago
  I don't understand what the product is, and the landing page is very laggy/slow for me. Even the HN demo is confusing, a lot of text and no header or short sentence explaining how it works.