By "your favorite books" does this mean that I can take a picture of a book, or upload a PDF or something? For IP reasons I'm certain your app can't come with any of my favorite books.
Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
151–160 of 160 posts
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#152By "your favorite books" does this mean that I can take a picture of a book, or upload a PDF or something? For IP reasons I'm certain your app can't come with any of my favorite books.
You can upload an ePub file within the app.
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#153How would you deal with things like Japanese and English, where the source and target languages are awfully apart? French, Italian and Spanish all share the same root and English borrows a lot of words from the three of them (plus the alphabet and the indo-european origin).
I'm planning to test German, which also has big differences in language structure.
I expect the app still works well for reinforcing vocabulary, but less well for demonstrating grammar.
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used the Fluent Forever app to acquire about 1,000 Italian words in one year. Agree that it wouldn't win awards for polish (maybe Polish), but it fairly faithfully implements the method described in the book, which is roughly: make your own flash cards, using memorable imagery, from curated word lists designed for forming a wide range of sentences, and then study these using spaced repetition. You also get the ear…
Not to take a dig at you but to set some context for other language learners reading this, 1000 words in a year is awful progress. It would take you 10 years to have just a semi-fluent vocabulary in a simple (for native English speakers) language like Spanish, Italian, or French, and that's not including grammar. This is the main problem with feel-good apps like Duolingo, giving all sorts of positive feedback for wha…
I agree it was not especially fast progress. I should have said, in one year of casually using FF and a weekly (very good) Italki tutor, I was able to pass a B1 CILS exam and read a children's novel, which regardless of the number of words learned per day felt like a good achievement.
A back of the envelope estimate is that I spent 500 hours in high school Spanish to reach a similar level as I achieved as an adult in ~60 hours of rote vocabulary acquisition and ~60 hours of 1:1 conversation.
Reaching beginner-intermediate fluency in 20 minutes average per day—half of which is spent talking with a native speaker, not on boring flash cards—is easily attainable by someone who is motivated to learn but doesn't need to go at a breakneck pace, or feels that cramming 2,000 flash cards (let alone creating them) in a month sounds like hell. I was pleased it worked for me with as little time investment as I put in.
I am thinking about getting back into studying to see how chatbots have changed the experience, which could probably be used to synthesize more effective recall prompts. (I, Internet rando, argued to the FF team a few years ago that this would be disruptive tech, but they pursued their upmarket $25/session coaching service instead.)
(One thing I like in theory about FF, vs Anki generally, is that it splits the top n wordlist into sets that are "compatible" (fruit, apple, red) rather than "categorical" (red, green, blue). It feels like it helps to build the inter-word connections. However once these are tossed into the grinder of the spaced repetition algorithm, I'm not sure if it makes a difference.)
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#155Not available for India ?
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#156Shout out for an app called Language Transfer that I just came across via Reddit ( https://www.languagetransfer.org/ ). It teaches languages speaking first through a simple audio course. Developed by one guy, completely free and without ads. From what I’ve seen so far has a very clear focus on quickly getting up to speed with a different angle than other courses. It talks about how to build vocabulary by looking at g…
This app is truly the best one
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used the Fluent Forever app to acquire about 1,000 Italian words in one year. Agree that it wouldn't win awards for polish (maybe Polish), but it fairly faithfully implements the method described in the book, which is roughly: make your own flash cards, using memorable imagery, from curated word lists designed for forming a wide range of sentences, and then study these using spaced repetition. You also get the ear…
Not to take a dig at you but to set some context for other language learners reading this, 1000 words in a year is awful progress. It would take you 10 years to have just a semi-fluent vocabulary in a simple (for native English speakers) language like Spanish, Italian, or French, and that's not including grammar. This is the main problem with feel-good apps like Duolingo, giving all sorts of positive feedback for wha…
Where did you get those numbers from? 10k words is generally considered a CEFR B2/C1 level which already is a fluent level.
Semi-fluent, depending on how you describe it, is anywhere between 1k and 5k words. To comfortably communicate with native speakers about simple topics you need 1000-2000 words.
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#158This reminds me of Linugua Latina Per Se Illustrata (Latin language illustrated by itself), which is a latin self-learning book written fully in Latin. It's structured in such a way that you naturally learn new words and grammar as you progress just by reading it. I suggest everyone check it out even if you don't care about learning latin, simply because it's one of the most fun ways to learn a language I've seen
For anyone else curious you can checkout the 2nd part this book for free on Open Library
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8949379W/Lingua_Latina_per_s...
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#159Hey a little later to the party here but I'm really enjoying this. I started reading a book with it and while I agree with others it's not great for grammar it certainly shows me many new words without requiring me to read at a glacial pace.
PS: You should def try to include some books from https://standardebooks.org/ which are much nicer formatted than the ones you're using from Project Gutenberg.
Good luck and I hope you can keep building this out. Already the update to tap anywhere to close the word definition is a nice improvement :)
Re: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
#160Why the developer doesn’t make this app available in all regions beats me. If you’re reading this, please do so so I can download it.
I'll look to make it available in more regions soon. I just need to check the copyright limitations for the eBooks made available in the app.
Thank you, would love to try it out