Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
getflowlingo.com
Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#2I'm a little confused about how this works, and the site doesn't answer my question readily.
What is the source? The "Browse any website" claim implies that you're translating on the fly and then I learn by translating back to English. Is this the case?
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#3I'm a little confused about how this works, and the site doesn't answer my question readily. What is the source? The "Browse any website" claim implies that you're translating on the fly and then I learn by translating back to English. Is this the case?
Given the inadequacies of automated translation, it would make more sense if the model was: browse websites written originally in foreign languages, and automatically translate to English (or another known language) for hints.
This is also implied by their suggestion of "learn the culture surrounding a language with local trending news."
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#4I'm a little confused about how this works, and the site doesn't answer my question readily. What is the source? The "Browse any website" claim implies that you're translating on the fly and then I learn by translating back to English. Is this the case?
Hey, thanks for the feedback on the site being confusing. Will update to make it more clear!
All content is native content in the foreign language you are learning. Suppose you are learning Spanish - we'll show you a feed of popular news articles originally written in Spanish so you can practice by reading those. There is machine translation built in for words or sentences that you might need help with. We'll even automatically create flashcards for you for words you look up, to help you review with spaced repetition later.
When we say "browse any website" we mean that Flowlingo can be used as a general purpose browser - you can navigate to any website in Spanish and use the same learning tools to practice!
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#5I'm a little confused about how this works, and the site doesn't answer my question readily. What is the source? The "Browse any website" claim implies that you're translating on the fly and then I learn by translating back to English. Is this the case?
Given the inadequacies of automated translation, it would make more sense if the model was: browse websites written originally in foreign languages, and automatically translate to English (or another known language) for hints. This is also implied by their suggestion of "learn the culture surrounding a language with local trending news."
Yep, that's exactly how Flowlingo works! We do the same for books and videos as well (native content in foreign language with ML translation tools to help you read/watch)
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#6Just tried it out. Seems like a nice idea and can see how it might be useful.
However, for the Android version in Chinese, it's very difficult to get the translations of the words - it defaults to translating entire lines. Also, when you try and adjust the amount that is being selected, if it hasn't finished reading out the whole line, you get two chunks being read simultaneously.
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#7Reading the reviews on Google Play, it seems there is some in-app purchase, but on the website, I see no indication paying is needed at some point ( sounds like all is free actually when reading the website) so I am confused...
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#8Only accepting US phone numbers for a non-region-specific app in [current year]?
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#9No ToS, no privacy policy, no physical address, no authors' names... and it wants to roam with me inside my pocket?!?
Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news
#10Just tried it out. Seems like a nice idea and can see how it might be useful. However, for the Android version in Chinese, it's very difficult to get the translations of the words - it defaults to translating entire lines. Also, when you try and adjust the amount that is being selected, if it hasn't finished reading out the whole line, you get two chunks being read simultaneously.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. We definitely need to improve the app for Chinese - word tokenization is much harder here so we don't handle word selection well right now. Our app is most polished for languages like Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Russian.
Stay tuned though! We definitely want to make it work just as well for Chinese in the future!