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

lairner.com

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

#81

70 languages from one guy? Was this vibe-coded?

The lessons are questionable. I did the Japanese one, and despite answering all of the incredibly easy questions perfectly, it dumped me into lesson 6, which is also incredibly easy and was the same thing I'd already answered correctly. Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.)…

Yeah - on the second point. AI-based Japanese TTS do that, issing arts of ords and/or inexanct with literacy import used. I don't know precisely why, but probably part labeling, part over-acting. Agreed on lessons being shallow.

The UI also hanged the browser for full 5 seconds in places.

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

#82
post #57

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…

Hey dear neighbor :3 I'm no German speaker, but I'm French, and without invalidating your initial claim (about the AI generated stuff), in France we do translate "good morning" by "Bonjour", which literally means good (bon) day (jour). Any other translation would be weird: if you'd translate "good morning" by "Bonne journée" -> that would be super weird, because this is something one could say in France to say "Goodb…

Thanks for your input neighbor! That's interesting because other sources actually start with "Salut", without going into the usage too much. Good to know.

Bonjour for good morning is correct. The problem is that the app introduced it to me like this:

"A in German means Z in French. B in German also means Z in French. Here is the word Z without any context. What's the correct word in German? You can choose between A, B, C and D. B is wrong, I wanted A".

I can imagine that they have direct mappings between the words, without checking for collisions. Even that could be fine, if the frontpage didn't claim this was "curated by experts" and it didn't happen literally in the first lesson haha.

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

#83
post #80

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 n…

Hey, bugs can happen, no problem.

But sorry, I do not believe your last sentence. German-French should be a popular pair, and you yourself claimed to speak both languages. This happened literally in the first beginner lesson. Everyone with most basic knowledge of the languages would catch that. This wouldn't even be a big deal if you'd communicate openly. This is a problem especially as you take money for the service after the free tier.

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

#84
post #29

As an learning (and conversational) Khmer speaker, I tried the Khmer module. It's an absolute disaster in both romanization of Khmer characters and pronounciation. Simple words like 'arkun' are pronounced _very_ incorrectly and the romanization is incomprehensible.

Have you found any good resources that you'd recommend for Khmer? My fiancee's family is Cambodian and I thought it'd be fun to learn a bit of the language, but sadly found it kind of poorly supported when I went looking through the usual apps.

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

#85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Hey, bugs can happen, no problem. But sorry, I do not believe your last sentence. German-French should be a popular pair, and you yourself claimed to speak both languages. This happened literally in the first beginner lesson. Everyone with most basic knowledge of the languages would catch that. This wouldn't even be a big deal if you'd communicate openly. This is a problem especially as you take money for the service…

Hey there, gotcha, sorry for the bug, it's solved for the English French course, I hadn't tested the German French pair (although I do speak C2 German and B2 French). Thanks for the report, we have many many courses, many people that work on these courses, and recently relaunched entirely. We do believe in the mission, and we do have linguists and native speakers paid to work on these courses.

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

#86
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, bugs can happen, no problem. But sorry, I do not believe your last sentence. German-French should be a popular pair, and you yourself claimed to speak both languages. This happened literally in the first beginner lesson. Everyone with most basic knowledge of the languages would catch that. This wouldn't even be a big deal if you'd communicate openly. This is a problem especially as you take money for the service…

Hey there, gotcha, sorry for the bug, it's solved for the English French course, I hadn't tested the German French pair (although I do speak C2 German and B2 French). Thanks for the report, we have many many courses, many people that work on these courses, and recently relaunched entirely. We do believe in the mission, and we do have linguists and native speakers paid to work on these courses.

how many of the 700 courses have been fully tested end to end by an expert human other than yourself?

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

#87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider anyone "fluent" who has only 70% comprehension. More like 90%+. If you're assuming things based on context that is a marker of a low level of comprehension. Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.

I would say "full comprehension" would mean you don't need words and phrases explained to you on a daily basis. And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%. Also,…

"Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension. I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency"."

I get it, and in my experience, when I find myself relistening and not being sure about "half the words," it means Im not fluent!

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

#89
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say "full comprehension" would mean you don't need words and phrases explained to you on a daily basis. And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%. Also,…

"Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension. I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency"." I get it, and in my experience, when I find myself…

I wasn’t claiming fluency in these languages, just making a point that comprehension is normally very over-exaggerated, and that “full comprehension” is a long way off from just average “comprehension”, and in most cases not needed to converse/listen/read. A big part of fluency is being able to deal with a certain level of ambiguity

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

#90
I'm upset that there are 700+ courses across 70+ languages, but none is my language, Esperanto, the most successful international auxiliary language of all time, with an estimated 2M-5M speakers worldwide. I'm unable to select Esperanto as the language I want to learn, nor as the language I already speak. This is the kind of thing Esperantists have come to expect of language learning resources which support a low number of languages, but when there's an app which supports 70+ languages, and Esperanto isn't one of them, it feels like a deliberate omission.

There are tons of great reasons to learn Esperanto, but one is its propaedeutic value: learning Esperanto for a year, and then French for a year, leaves you knowing more French than if you had studied only French for two years. Some cite the ease of learning it (I learned it to a conversational level in about two weeks), and some the intuitive grammar (only 16 grammar rules, no exceptions). Whatever the case, the value of learning Esperanto is huge, even if you have no plans to become active in the Esperanto-speaking community.

It's great that Lairner allows one to learn endangered languages and minority languages—I'm learning Irish, for instance, which only has ~200K native speakers, most of whom are in Ireland. Learning Irish (and other Celtic languages) is immensely mind-expanding, and it unlocks a rich literature and culture. But the original literature and culture of Esperanto is even more vast, rich, and international, and is not restricted to any geographic area.

Another issue I want to bring up is the unnecessary conflation of language with geographic region. In Lairner, languages are given flags of nations, as if there's a 1:1 map of language to country. That is a really bad assumption. Languages go beyond the borders of nations. Just think of Basque, for example. Or Esperanto. (And Esperanto has a flag!)

A Turkish speaker can't learn Basque, by the way, using Lairner. Basque is not a language which is supported at all, as far as I can tell, and Turkish doesn't seem to come up as a possible L1 language for most languages. The site says "700+ courses. Every combination." But there is not every combination. To learn Irish, for instance, you have to already know English or German. There's no Chinese -> Irish, or Japanese -> Irish.

If it were me, I'd feature Esperanto as the language everyone should learn first. Then I'd ensure that, using Esperanto, you can learn any other language. That way you wouldn't have to write lessons for every language pair, only X -> Esperanto and Esperanto -> X.

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