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Show HN: VocAdapt – YouTube Speech Modifier for Language Learning
Hey guys,
I'm building VocAdapt, a browser extension that helps you learn languages from real content—like Wikipedia articles or YouTube videos—instead of relying on textbooks and flashcards.
How it works:
1. Choose any text or YouTube video
2. VocAdapt adjusts content to your 90% comprehension, letting you naturally grasp the rest from context
3. The app injects words from your vocab list into content - giving you frequent and natural exposure to words you want to master
It's in early alpha, so expect bugs and limited features.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
- gumboshoes 2y agoLike many such projects, you seem to be working from the principle that language is learned at the word level. It is at the very start with the earliest, most basic vocabulary. But after the first 100-200 or so most-common words (number depends on the language), language is best and most often learned in chunks, phrases, collocations, dialogues, etc. The key mistake in most language-learning apps is that they put off this latter stage and focus on words, and then pretty much never get back to the latter stage in a meaningful way except through stilted conversations that are little better than those you can hear on hundred-year-old vinyl records. Source: I am a linguist and language specialist.
- nazar_tekhta 2y agoExactly! That's what I dislike about popular approaches - they focus on direct translation from L1 to L2. My Vocadapt takes a different approach. While reading, you simply mark unfamiliar words or collocations you encounter. Later, VocAdapt injects these same words/phrases into different contexts, allowing you to naturally deduce their meaning without translation. What do you think about this approach? It seems to differ from what you're describing...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]