Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?

Totally agree and I do all those things. My desire for a calm, non-gamified learning app would not be a replacement for all other methods.

If you are avoiding subscriptions, are you doing credit buckets? Up front X months in advance and a reminder to top up?

I find either of these more ethical but it is worth noting that any non-expiring, roll-over credit scheme is going to kill you. All you need is one or two months where you’re focussed on infrastructure instead of fresh content and you will find users get out of the habit of using it up, which can end up with you effectively in debt to your users, who will expect more value the longer they wait.

Oh, thanks for this link. Looks great and it may suit me well. I need to settle in and learn Python but I am experiencing tremendously severe dysregulation at the moment, and my normal quick deep learning is simply not happening.

I used https://learn.mangolanguages.com/ to get to something like ~b1/b2 in French after a year. I did a lesson or two every day, and did all of the review, pretty much much every day.

I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.

Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.

On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.

I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.

I don't think it's a mistake. Non-subscription without clear gamification and engagement tricks seems like Rosetta Stone basically and that's the longest-running, most effective language learning software I'm aware of. When I joined the Army 18 years ago, while waiting for school assignment, I had the opportunity to train provincial reconstruction teams as a role player and had to cram learn some reasonable level of conversational Pashtun and that was what we used, before smart phones were widely adopted. The only real innovation I've seen since then is conversational LLMs that allow you free-form practice without a human partner, but even back then, scripted conversational practice was pretty good as long as there was a wide enough diversity of scripts.

Problem is more along the lines of "solo developer" here. Hacker News seems to have a real thing about this niche for whatever reason, but when doing something like this that I think requires real expertise in a wide variety of subjects that aren't software development, I think you need help. There's no way something like Rosetta Stone was developed without the input of experts in language learning and teaching, for instance. Knowing the platforms, programming languages, frameworks, and app store onboarding and delivery processes is already a lot for one person, but expecting to know the target domain on top of that is expecting an awful lot from yourself. I don't think it's a great sign trying to crowdsource business strategy from a free web discussion board, as a single example. This is the kind of conversation you want to have with your private team of people you know for sure have the experience they claim to have, not anonymous comments.