Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#71

Post by barrell » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #67

barrell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please get in touch if you have any questions! The setup process is hit and miss, but there's a telegram community for members with many happy customers. I'm there all the time and we're all happy to help! Plus it would be awesome to get more Maltese learners. I have no one to gush about this language with :D

Can't wait to try it out. Have you been to Malta?

Not yet! I speak some Italian and want to learn Arabic. I found out there was a semitic language with Italian vocabulary in the latin script and that's what started my obsession.

Actually to be completely honest, I learned about Maltese, checked my app, and saw it supported Maltese. That night I was learning a language with an app I'd previously built without even knowing the language existed. That's what started my obsession with it.

Then turns out it's an island in an awesome location with an even cooler history. And it uses the letter Ħ

What made you start learning Maltese?

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#72

Post by bradreaves2 » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

Gave it a try for a language I know (Spanish) and one I don't (Russian).

On Russian, the explanations of why some answers were correct/incorrect didn't load (presumably an AI call failed?). Especially at lower layers, a good fallback would be a simple dictionary definition.

On Spanish, I did the placement test, then it asked which "dialect" I wanted. I selected Mexican, and was treated with truly excellent renderings of European pronunciation. I wouldn't have been mad if all it had was one set of pronunciation, and it's more frustrating to see the ignored option than to never have it at all.

As for the placement test: I got dropped into lesson 2 for Spanish. For comparison, I placed into Lesson 5 in Russian, where I actually got more incorrect answers. The Spanish placement test wasn't very deep, and I knew all the answers. It told me I got two wrong, so either the test is wrong or I just got punchy and hit the wrong buttons.

Recommendation: scale back on the ambition. Focus on getting the educational and product experience right with languages you know first. Be honest about data provenance and limitations.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#73

Post by feintruled » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

I was impressed to see Irish was included, but it soon became clear it's all LLM generated. That's not enough to write it off on its own (ChatGPT can be surprisingly good when explaining Irish sentences) but I spotted so many mistakes in the demo questions alone I can't imagine this is going to help anyone learn anything.

I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#74

Post by hagbard_c » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

stronglikedan wrote: post #11

nickjantz wrote: post #4

I watched the demo. It looks like a clone of duolingo. Can you do a better job of explaining how this is different? What features does it have that duo doesn't. How does the app push you to those features vs just falling into the same pattern as duo? You say you learned Turkish with lairner. What level of fluency did you achieve? Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension? Edit: I'm not trying to…

> Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension? Only a very small percentage of people that learn a language that is not their native language can achieve that.

Nonsense, that's called 'learning a language' and is done by many who move abroad. I'm Dutch but more or less fluent in English and Swedish, can come quite far in German and make myself understood in and understand French. I'd have to learn local idioms in any of those countries, including the Netherlands since some expressions are really local and don't see much of any use outside of the village or county.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#75

Post by vunderba » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

barrell wrote: post #66

graypegg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or…

My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on. I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5). I'm pre…

This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#76

Post by loveparade » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #21

loveparade wrote: post #12

A bit off-topic, but it's interesting how the first thing I check now is whether this is a vibe coded app (which it seems to be) or something that had serious effort put into it.

Define "effort". I mean, "effort" to me in this context is what the creator of $project thinks it is worth their time. Don't you agree? If you want to learn a new computer language yourself, vibecoding will probably not help you. If you want to create something to scratch your itch, and spend time and mental effort in getting it polished, isn't that effort? It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a goo…

I think your last point is the important one. I don't mind vibe coded app if they are polished. But a polished vibe coded app looks like a non-vibe-coded app because of the polishing. The polishing is 95% of the effort. This app here looks fully vibe coded, without much polishing, at least to me.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#77

Post by vunderba » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

thunfischtoast wrote: post #22

It's always a good initiative to build something on your own. Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users. Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts. I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language. The very first items were: 1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better) 2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting…

Agreed - the landing page specifically claims “Over 700 expert-crafted courses for any language pair imaginable.”

I’m a trust-but-verify kind of person, and I can’t find a single mention of any language-learning facilities, academies, linguists, native speakers, or anything else that would corroborate this.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#78

Post by t17r » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

Here to answer some of these questions: We offer a huge part of our corpus for free, and we offer a super cheap Premium offer in order to still make some money. We use linguists, teachers, and native speakers to curate our courses, but we're a small team of three people who just started this a few months ago, not all of our content is yet verified and corrected. We're working together with 2 institutions for endangered languages, offer them a "cms"-like interface to host their own courses alongside our existing courses. Yes, there are bugs. Yes, placements aren't great. But we're working on it! Goal is: Combinations. Make it possible to learn French from Arabic. Make it possible to learn Igbo from German. And so on. There's no fraud involved (how even do you imagine anything fraudulent here, it's a language learning app with a massive free tier), we're just trying to make it accessible.

Thanks for all the feedback, this filled up our backlog for surely a few weeks.

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#79

Post by barrell » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #75

barrell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on. I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5). I'm pre…

This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.

I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.

So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)

Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!

Re: Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner

#80

Post by t17r » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

thunfischtoast wrote: post #22

It's always a good initiative to build something on your own. Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users. Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts. I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language. The very first items were: 1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better) 2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting…

The issue here is a simple bug. We have two pairs for that specific lesson: - Hello Bonjour - Good morning Bonjour

They are identified by the question's id. And by the id we find the answer, and this is a bug where we show you one of the Bonjours, and only one of the answers is right per id. It's just a bug, that we already have mechanics for, but it's not always perfect. The course is still tested by linguists and native speakers.