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

app.fluentsubs.com

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

#121

Post by BalinKing »

pjc50 wrote: post #109
BalinKing wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's the meaning behind this joke? Is it just referencing the fact that American English drops "u" in the spelling of e.g. "color"?

It's primarily a reference to various language selection dropdowns offering "Chinese (Traditional)" (which is used in Taiwan) and "Chinese (Simplified)" (which is used on the Chinese mainland). That difference arises from Mao-era simplification of many of the most common hanzi characters to make them easier to write or distinguish. Mixed with, yes, the variant spellings and word choices (e.g. chips/crisps/biscuits) t…

I think my confusion is more from the implication that variant spellings imply "simplification"—even at a glance, simplified and traditional hanzi differ greatly in complexity, whereas I don't see how "chips" is any simpler than "crisps", even as a joke....

EDIT: Of course, it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things—feel free to ignore my pedantry over a silly joke :-)

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

#122

Post by annienar »

I tried the japanese one, as an A1, I can't read/don't know kanji yet, would be nice to have an option to see katakana/hiragana only, an option to have furigana and an option to see the kanji. Also would like an option to save phrases and not just a word. but likes it overall

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

#124

Post by alchemyzach »

beardedwizard wrote: post #117
iambateman wrote: post #97

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.

True but then I remember that most people are just paying for the feeling. There's millions to be made actually teaching people stuff (learning is hard) but there are billions to be made making people feel like they are.

That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares

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

#125

Post by mlsu »

beardedwizard wrote: post #117
iambateman wrote: post #97

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.

Is it?

At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.

A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:

https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...

20 hours a week of intensive instruction.

Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks

This is what it actually takes.

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

#126

Post by ph4evers »

sergiosgc wrote: post #123

Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.

Thanks! It is available on Desktop immediately after you finish a segment. I'm thinking of bringing it back to mobile. I made it a toggle to save some space on small devices

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

#127

Post by ph4evers »

iambateman wrote: post #97

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!

Thanks! Competing with the giant like Duolingo is hard. But I believe that there is an edge, especially if these transcription models keep improving. I find them quite good already but simple mistakes are very off-putting.

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

#128

Post by ph4evers »

hrydgard wrote: post #50

Great stuff! Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.

Will do. I also like the click to place more than dragging & dropping.

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

#129

Post by ph4evers »

philipjoubert wrote: post #4

This is great - I've actually started building something similar myself a few months ago. Requests: - Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America - Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used) - Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)

Thanks!

> Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America Will do!

> Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)

I'm working on splitting it up in easy/normal videos. That should be do-able to assess.

> Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)

I'm thinking about creating a browser plugin where you can tick a box to automatically import it into Fluentsubs. Or create an exercise from an existing video. It will take minutes before it is fully transcribed but it can be a nice way to prep your own content without people blaming me that I serve biased content.

I'm not sure though if people are willing to install browser plugins. I'm always a bit weiry with plugins that are invasive on websites like YouTube.

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