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Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

app.fluentsubs.com

111–120 of 189 posts

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#112
It seems we either ate all your LLM credits or knocked your server over since the spinner just spins (checking dev tools coughs up that https://app.fluentsubs.com/api/exercises/daily?language=fr is 504)

After 4 retries, the spinner finally gave up but it incorrectly said "Sorry, no exercise available for this language today." and not, as it should have, "We were unable to load the exercises. Try again later, or contact support at ${email}"

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The AppSec-er in me wants to point out that returning the version of nginx that you're using is an antipattern since it enables more targeted attacks if the version has woes; it does it in the error, and it does it in the headers

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#113

It seems we either ate all your LLM credits or knocked your server over since the spinner just spins (checking dev tools coughs up that https://app.fluentsubs.com/api/exercises/daily?language=fr is 504) After 4 retries, the spinner finally gave up but it incorrectly said "Sorry, no exercise available for this language today." and not, as it should have, "We were unable to load the exercises. Try again later, or conta…

Thanks for reporting! I'll fix the Nginx version exposure.

Yes, the server got knocked out. I was not expecting this much traffic hah. I already upgraded it but I have an NLP server with 10 language models loaded and it seems to be grinding CPU resources.

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#114
Nice UX.

News is good because it is inherently more interesting than any old video vs having to curate a bunch of interesting videos. It's also good that the videos loop—most tools that have tried to sync videos seem to never autoloop which means you have to keep manually playing it which is annoying.

Some improvements:

Increase the amount of exercise videos for the pro subscription—I only see three and only one new 2min video per day. The format is good enough to be a regular learning tool. I'd rather see a wall of pro-only videos when evaluating whether I went to subscribe. You want to give a sense of immediate value via backlog that the user will unlock since the impulse buy is that I get to immediately do a bunch of exercises because I loved the teaser exercise.

I think the ideal is that I like the demo lesson, I register, I click the exercises list to do another exercise, and I see a bunch of paywalled interesting videos that I'll be able to watch&learn, so I pay right there on the spot after clicking a video that I wanted to listen to.

Exercises:

- Alphabetize the word list so they are easier to find. Takes me forever to find words in this kind of setup, same on Duolingo.

- Allow text input even with the word list visible. The exercise customization option would then just be "Show word bank: boolean".

- Let us click words.

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#115
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaa, you saved me, thought it's broken, but you have to drag this thing! ps. video shouldn't loop as default, it's annoying.

You didn’t even read the most basic settings that clearly say “click and drag interface” or something similar. But I still agree, tapping/clicking should work in sequential order eventually (it’s not as easy to implement). Re, looping; there are controls to turn it off. You aren’t paying attention one bit. If you’re going to say things, at least be diligent in the things you are going to address.

You don't need to be so combative in this feedback thread for someone's language learning app.

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#117

This has a ton of potential! Keep going! Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business. But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app. You can do it!

The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.

Re: Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

#120
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally I immediately noticed that too. Are the "gaps" generated by an LLM? I think the model might not understand Japanese very well.

It's a bit like segmenting "don't see" into "don't" and "see." ません is the negative of the auxiliary ます just as "don't" is the negative of the auxiliary "do." If you have to split Japanese text into words and want to be principled about it, treating ません as a separate word is not a bad way to go about it. But of course there are other ways, so a "fill in the blank" question with two gaps right next to each other is gen…

+1 this definitely makes sense, since you're gonna have a million verbs ending in "masen", just make it a separate word and understand that it's just part of the conjugation.
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