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Show HN: Term Typer – Learn a language by typing
Hey HN! I'm from Brazil and I created Term Typer to help my little brother learn other languages while practicing his keyboard typing skills. We've found it super helpful and fun. Feel free to try it out and let me know your thoughts and feedback. Thanks a lot!
- david_allison 3y agoI love everything about this, it's really clean! Doesn't support my L2s, so I won't use it long-term Constructive feedback: * the 'typed' word should be discarded in a few cases if you change the L1/L2 * No 'success' feedback after submitting my email for notifications
- jeanmayer 3y agothanks for the feedback, I'll update it soon
- alfonsodev 3y agoVery nice! I think this could work for me, for the type of learner I am. As a feedback, would be nice to have a button to skip to the next word, and some sort of gamification as rounds of words to have a sense of progress. Could you consider adding Romanian language ? Multumesc!
- david_allison 3y agoTheir word list is open source: https://github.com/agencyenterprise/Term-Typer-Words https://github.com/agencyenterprise/Term-Typer-Words
- jeanmayer 3y agoI'll add romanian. Come back in about 2 hours and it will be there :D
- jeanmayer 3y agoadded Romanian
- rovn 3y agoIt makes me remember the days when I learned coding. Instead of copy and paste, I tried to type the code in the editor. I was learning by doing, and I can remember all the mistakes I made. Thank you for your time and effort. Do you open your source code?
- metayrnc 3y agoLooks like a great idea! It doesn’t support languages I am interested in right now but I will be sure to go back and check it out again. One suggestion, for words that break a line, the effect of typing perfectly on the background disappears. It might be a hard problem to solve but if the word is going to be on the next line when written completely, it should be in the next line when I start typing.
- croemer 3y agoFrom the title I thought it was teaching programming languages - that would be a nice extension as well. Just type out some linux source code to learn C :)
- jeanmayer 3y agothat's actually a great idea, will think about this and create something
- nmstoker 3y agoFantastic if you do, as it's a nice elegant yet simple design you've created. I totally thought it meant computer language too, but that's likely the context of viewing it here! Anyway, great job with this tool, whether or not you can add computer languages!
- myself248 3y agoSome years ago, I read a programing book, and it explained, paraphrasing: > There is no disc included with the book. All the code printed on the page will have to be typed in, by you. This is deliberate. Typing is sloppy, but programming is precise, and it is imperative that you develop attention to detail if you are to program successfully. The intent is that you develop increasing attention to detail along with the programs in the book, which are in order of increasing complexity.
- elbear 3y agoFrom what I remember, Learn Python the Hard Way used a similar principle.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoYeah, same. My first thought was "oh hey, this will help me get some Rust syntax under my fingertips!" It's a very large ask but I do look forward to other (spoken) languages being expanded. Could definitely use this for Japanese practice.
- Rucadi 3y agoThis is super fun! Congrats!
- brandonhorst 3y agoI wonder how well this approach would work with handwriting and Hanzi/Kanji. Don't focus too much on learning, just write the characters and learn the meanings over and over again.
- jeanmayer 3y agohmmm I think it could be another project to specific learn chinese
- rickcarlino 3y agoI’ve been building a somewhat similar Open Source voice based app. Please reach out if you ever want to talk or collaborate. https://koala.cards https://koala.cards
- jeanmayer 3y agothis is awesome, congratz! I'd love to hear more about the idea!
- nokoanubis 3y agoThis is really cool. Clean and simple UI. I'll definitely be using this to help keep up my french lol
- jeanmayer 3y agothanks for the feedback! I'll keep adding more and more words :D
- cassepipe 3y agoThis is awesome. Especially since Duolingo mostly moved away from typing. Currently learning your language, this is going to be a great help. Obrigado.
- jeanmayer 3y agode nada! any other language you'd like to see in term typer?
- rebhan 3y agogerman
- jeanmayer 3y agoadded german
- schoen 3y agoAre you using machine translation to make the definitions available in arbitrary language pairs? If so, is that going to have a high enough error rate to confuse people?
- jeanmayer 3y agoI was using chatgpt to help me with the translation. If you see any error, please feel free to update the words list here > https://github.com/agencyenterprise/term-typer-words https://github.com/agencyenterprise/term-typer-words OR let me know and I update it. Thanks!
- cassepipe 3y agowow so quick thanks I have a much harder request : Chinese with both the characters and Pinyin That would be very helpful
- 3y ago
- developer1000 3y ago[flagged]
- hugocast 3y agoReally cool. Obrigado! I wish it had German. I signed up for notifications. Keep up the good work!
- jeanmayer 3y agoIt has german now (:
- temporarara 3y agoI tried German, but everything seemed to be lowercase even though the words.js on github seems to be fine regarding the special German capitalization. Anyway, cool stuff. I once learned some latin by coding a simple program in C for terminal usage, basically just asking what is this word called, the wordlist file was specified as a command line argument. It was great and highly effective to memorize small chunks of words at a time. I still remember all those complex terms, so at least for me this type of learning works. This looks promising.
- jeanmayer 3y agothanks! I didn't know about the special German capitalization. I'll fix this.
- bironran 3y agoThis looks really great, but I wish there was a setting for "SAT level English". That could've really helped me improve my own vocabulary. Also "used in a sentence" so I could actually type something in a sentence. And... maybe ignore typos, spaces, commas etc in the non main word? The main word is important for sure but the rest is less, just forces you to focus on what you're learning.
- jeanmayer 3y agoYeah that makes sense, some people complained about the definition punctuation. I'll remove the validation of the definition. We have only 20 words for now, but I'll make sure to update it and add levels. Thanks!
- Rembargo 3y agoClean and pleasant interface! I'd suggest a possibility to create your own "decks", so that users could have more flexibility, as well as reduce the manual workload off of you. I'd personally be interested in Finnish and would love to add words that I am still learning. De qualquer jeito, o projeto tá top. Mandaram bem demais, boa sorte!
- jeanmayer 3y agoAwesome idea, I'll add the option to the user add whatever they want to write. The project was made in 2 days, so there are a lot of things to improve. Thank you so much parceiro!
- SuperHeavy256 3y agoCan you add typing sound effects like typingclub.com has?
- jeanmayer 3y agoI'll add an option with sounds, thanks!
- windowshopping 3y agoit's a good idea but in practice i'm find it really annoying. i typed out the full definition and it highlighted it red and won't say why. does it expect me to type the accent marks? :/ it's also weird that i have to hit enter instead of the line wrapping automatically.
- brlewis 3y agoThis seems like a great idea, nicely implemented. Minor bug report: the pronunciation button pronounced Spanish "adaptar" as "ajaptar".
- jeanmayer 3y agoThanks! It worked here, what's your browser?
- janetmissed 3y agoVery nice site, it looks and functions great. However, autocorrect still works for me on MacOS, unlike other typing practice sites. Maybe not that important, but it does somewhat diminish the typing practice you can get :)
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoIt's pretty funny that the main failure mode I run into is unconsciously typing the translated version of a word rather than the foreign-language version my eyes are looking at (at least with all the similar-looking cognates). Cool idea!
- jeanmayer 3y agoYeah, it can confuse our brains a little bit hahah. thanks!
- aslushnikov 3y agoThis is awesome! I enjoyed typing out the 20 words available, and would love to type more! Why are the majority of the words in the word list [1] commented out? Also, I would appreciate if the word & its description is automatically pronounced (or maybe there's a setting to do so). This way I would be able to train audio perception, which is oftentimes challenging with French. Right now, clicking the "speaker" icon speaks out the word, not definition, and also steals focus from the input field. 1: https://github.com/agencyenterprise/Term-Typer-Words/blob/main/words.js https://github.com/agencyenterprise/Term-Typer-Words/blob/ma...
- jeanmayer 3y agoI removed the commented words and updated it with Romanian and German. Thanks for the feedback! If you click on definition, it will speak (I need to improve the ux here)
- stkai 3y agoThank you / obrigado! First time seeing something like this, and it underscores for me that people need different modes of learning a language.
- jeanmayer 3y agoEu que agradeço! I agree. I love to mix fun and learning.
- gamerDude 3y agoOverall, I really like this. Know English, Learning Spanish. I wish that you wouldn't automatically move to the next word when I finish typing. I want to read it over again and process, then move forward.
- mawise 3y agoThis looks awesome! For written Portuguese, how different is Brazillian vs European? I've been trying to learn European Portuguese and it is challenging to find resources that differentiate between the two.
- jeanmayer 3y agoThanks! Basically the language and the rules are the same, but there are a few differences. For example, in European Portuguese, a silent 'c' and 'p' are often retained in words like "acção" (action) and "óptimo" (optimal), whereas in Brazilian Portuguese, these letters have been dropped to become "ação" and "ótimo". Also, there are some words that are different like the word for "bus" in Brazil is "ônibus," whereas in Portugal, it's "autocarro". Overall, european portuguese is more formal, and brazilian, more casual.
- schoen 3y agoOther differences that stood out to me in visiting Lisbon and the Azores: (1) European Portuguese usually fully preserves "tu" (including distinctive verb forms), while in Brazilian Portuguese, it's often only used in oblique forms "te" and "ti", or regionally as a subject but often with the third person verb form. For example, in much of Brazil you would see "você tem" (even when speaking to a close friend or family member); in some parts of Brazil, like in Rio Grande do Sul, you would see "tu tem"; and in Portugal you might see "tu tens". (2) European Portuguese uses "a" + infinitive where Brazilian Portuguese uses the present participle: "estou a fazer" versus "estou fazendo", or "está a falar" versus "está falando". This distinction is very strong and consistent. (3) Pronunciation can be very different. The first thing you would notice is that the <d> before <e> and <i> is not pronounced as /dʒ/ and the <t> before those letters is not pronounced as /tʃ/. So for example <diabo> 'devil' or <diagonal> 'diagonal' start with /dʒ/ in Brazil but with /d/ in Europe, or <sede> 'thirst' ends with /dʒi/ in Brazil but /dɨ/ in Europe. Or especially the adjective ending <-mente> will be /'mẽtʃi/ in Brazil but /'mẽtɨ/ in Europe. The word-final vowels in European Portuguese often seem to get dropped entirely (or to be pronounced very softly or briefly), so you might even hear that adverb ending as /mẽt/ (approaching French!!). I found it fairly challenging as a non-native speaker.
- skeptrune 3y agoThis is awesome! Will be using it
- jeanmayer 3y agothanks!
- peersa 3y agoI've used keybr.com to learn the Cyrillic alphabet while learning Russian. I would love to use this to practice typing and learning Russian words and phrases.
- schoen 3y agoMuito legal mesmo! It might be helpful to provide a way to hide the L1 definition as a way of encouraging thinking in the target language where possible. When I took German at the Goethe-Institut, they were extremely committed to immersion and moderately discouraged the use of bilingual dictionaries, while the teachers would almost always attempt to explain vocabulary in German (or by example, like by acting something out or pointing to it). This is harder if you're very new to a language and don't have a live teacher present, but at some point it probably switches to being a benefit for many or most learners. The German teachers also encouraged students to try to explain vocabulary (to each other) in German, on one occasion literally having us play the game Taboo (in which you have to get people to guess a word without saying that word or a few closely thematically related terms). As an example from your site, when I tried it out with EN→PT, I encountered the defined word "joelho" 'knee' (which I already knew), and the definition used "coxa" 'thigh' which I had encountered in the past but mostly forgotten. It was helpful to me to see the Portuguese definition and possibly less helpful to see the English definition (because relying on it would have been a missed opportunity to refresh my knowledge of "coxa"). As an analogy, if I watch a movie with English subtitles, I almost always end up ignoring most of the spoken foreign language even if it's a language that I'm fairly familiar with, because the subtitles just make things too easy. I definitely think having the L1 definition easily available is important (in particular, in case the user doesn't understand all of the L2 definition!) but I suggest at least allowing people to choose not to see it every time, so that they can practice thinking in the target language.
- precompute 3y agoI'm bilingual and the importance of understanding a language though itself can not be understated. It's like bootstrapping the compiler for your language. If you don't, then you never really learn it, you just translate.
- unhammer 3y agoYes! I learn from listening to podcasts and such, and it's somehow more fun, instead of being told "floob means chair, now say floob after me" (one new word out of eight) and being in language-learning-mode, you're just listening to someone talking about something interesting and they're trying their best to convey the information – but it happens to be in a language you don't really know. The https://www.russianwithmax.com/ https://www.russianwithmax.com/ podcast does this very well (though you need a bit of basics, e.g. Pimsleur, first) – I'm still trying to find comparable podcasts for other languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling seems to be an adjacent method, TPRS . See also LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLVSTRATA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg#LINGVA_LATINA_PER_SE_ILLVSTRATA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg#LINGVA_LATINA... / https://archive.org/details/lingualatinapers0000oerb_x3i0/ https://archive.org/details/lingualatinapers0000oerb_x3i0/ :)
- acupofjose 3y agoI noticed an issue when typing multiple lines (for example: english->spanish `adaptar`) wouldn't detect the correct input unless typing shift+enter first. Also, is there a way to make it easier to type accents on a windows computer? Maybe an on-screen keyboard? Or a tooltip that pops up with a character map?
- mdaniel 3y agoDepending on your level of interest in really typing those letters after leaving the game, Windows does ship with an International keyboard layout (e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboards/kbdusx https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboards/kb... ). It can be annoying to leave it in place since there is a small delay when typing single quotes, for example, as it is waiting for the "chord" of 'e to make é (macOS does this too via option-e putting ´ on the screen and then waiting for the letter to which the accent will be applied), but if you find it annoying then Windows-spacebar will switch between your normal layout and the International one usually just for the window in focus. That can be good or bad depending on your expectations :-) I also have to switch to it to play a lot of games on Windows since developers are absolutely atrocious about distinguishing between the keyboard scan code and the layout scan code, so my day-to-day Dvorak makes the normal wasd in games all over the keyboard. Well, I'm cheating you a little since I could actually switch to just the English US, skipping the International part, but since I already have to have a 2nd layout for gaming, might as well get the accents for free
- jeanmayer 3y agohmmmm, currently, I'm not validating the accents, only the punctuation. I don't know exactly how to solve the problem of many different keyboards but I'll take a look. Thanks for the feedback!
- ji_zai 3y agoBug: I chose French, and I had to type “quelqu'un” - but no apostrophe I used was accepted. Neat project though!
- sandbach 3y agoI don't know where the German definitions are coming from, but they shouldn't all be lowercased -- all nouns in German start with a capital letter, so "verständis", rather than "Verständis", is actually a mistake.
- schoen 3y agoAnd because of this, you can actually have a noun and verb that are spelled the same except for that initial capital. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/denken#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/denken#German 'to think' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Denken#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Denken#German 'thinking'
- mnsc 3y agoAnd in English you can have a noun and verb that are spelled exactly the same. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/thinking https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/thinking
- jeanmayer 3y agofixed it, I'm sorry about that
- bear-_- 3y agoThis is really cool! If you could put a WPM counter on there, this would be a great way to test your typing speed and learn some new words. Nice job. :)
- jeanmayer 3y agoNice idea, I'll add a counter for every word/definition
- semireg 3y agoThanks for this. Instead of a definition it’d be fun to type out an example sentence so you can learn the surrounding words. That … and highlight the place you are typing in the source language so you can immerse yourself in both languages. I’d also enjoy paying $5 a month to nag me to spend X minutes or X words learning each day.
- jeanmayer 3y agoI can think of adding this paid feature for me to keep supporting the tool. Added to the backlog. Highlighting the current place you're typing would be hard as the construction of sentences can be completely different between languages, but I agree that it would be awesome to have.
- PixelEngineer 3y agoInteresting concept. However, the input matching seems a bit strict, it doesn't work even if there's just a missing space.
- jeanmayer 3y agoindeed, I'm literally comparing the expected text, and the typed text. I'm just removing the accents and lowering the cases
- blini2077 3y agoThanks. That was fun.
- 8mobile 3y agoHi, I like the idea, I would prefer to have an audio that guides me in order to improve the language. I wrote the sentence but I can't get to the next one. how to do? Thank you
- jeanmayer 3y agohey, it should automatically move to the next word when you finish typing correctly
- lionkor 3y agoThe German is just wrong, due to the lack of proper capitalization. This is an error in German and makes it very difficult to read and is unacceptable for a learning site. Pls fix :)
- jeanmayer 3y agoThanks for the feedback! I just fixed it, should be live in 10 minutes.
- burrish 3y agoGreat website I love the simple UI ! I subbed for the notifications, I hope more words and a support will come for Russian ! :)
- jeanmayer 3y agoawesome, there are a lot of people asking for russian. I'll add this soon (:
- rodrigodlu 3y agoHey pal, cheers from Rio! I use monkeytype everyday between some stressful tasks or pomodoros to keep my touch typing in check. Few things: Why do I need to complete 20 sessions? Can I do only a few? That's the only time I have between tasks. The line breaking is weird, sometimes the reference is on the line below, but what I'm typing is on the line above. Maybe it's a difference with the shadow or font-weight. At least here I can see a bit of a shadow with the reference behind. Anyway, awesome idea! Now I can train something that is not English using an existing habit. Thanks!
- jeanmayer 3y agoHey my carioca friend! We currently have only 20 words (and the list is random), the progress bar is just to give the sense of progress hahah, also, I'm not saving any state, so if you do 3 words and refresh the page, it will reset everything. About the reference below the text, It's like another div with the text below the textarea, that's why it breaks sometimes. I have to think of something better. Thank you so much for the feedback!
- developer1000 3y agoFor those that dont speak Portuguese and flagged my comment beleza = beautiful
- sparin9 2y agoLooks good, but I could not type special non-english characters!