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Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

kimchi-reader.app

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Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#31

Post by famouswaffles »

godelski wrote: post #11

This looks fantastic. As someone in a serious relationship with a Korean person, this is something I could actually see myself paying for too. But, I would like to see some more about what it offers. Right now it looks like it is a video caption replacer with a dictionary. There are free tools like that that exist. Anki is a plugin and not built in, why? What about those starting learning? Do you have lessons or smal…

I've been learning korean for a while now. I'll give my 2 cents.

It's not just a dictionary but a grammar parser, see also mirinae (https://mirinae.io/), the grammar parsing tool for Korean. Korean and English are so distant that a good grammatical parsing is infinitely more helpful than a dictionary and/or translator alone.

There actually isn't any other option, free or otherwise that combines all this "easy reading and watching" tools with a good parser.

Mirinae is great and better than the tool used here but is standalone and no longer lets you view grammar explanations for free.

GPT-4 also gives good parsings but it's even more cumbersome to use individually at scale (copy/paste, ask etc)

2. another big thing here is convenience. I'm not exaggerating when i say you can cut studying time in half at least having everything in one place.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#33

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #30
csa wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul. For folks who are learning Korean, hangul is maybe two days to get the basics and maybe a week or less to be able to get comfortable with it. For super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation, you might be right, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to design around these super-casual f…

Potential customers for an app like this don't neatly segment into "...folks who are learning Korean..." and "...super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation...". There is a continuum, and the continuum is weighted towards the casual side. Honestly, if most people only learn a little Korean from this app and it broadens their world only a little bit, it's still done tremendous good. Most people are not going…

Hebrew characters are a lot harder to learn that Hangul.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#35

Post by solidsnack9000 »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #33
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potential customers for an app like this don't neatly segment into "...folks who are learning Korean..." and "...super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation...". There is a continuum, and the continuum is weighted towards the casual side. Honestly, if most people only learn a little Korean from this app and it broadens their world only a little bit, it's still done tremendous good. Most people are not going…

Hebrew characters are a lot harder to learn that Hangul.

Well, look -- I think there is a lot to say there; but I wonder how to put it on an empirical footing.

Hangul is definitely one of the most logically organized, consistent and systematic systems of writing in the world -- and it may actually be number one in all those categories.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#36

Post by _dmn7 »

hiatus wrote: post #34

Does anyone know of applications like this for other languages, particularly Russian and Greek?

My somewhat similar project VocabSieve [1] is intended to make lookups and making Anki flashcards very easy. Among other things, you can import highlighted words from ereaders and make Anki cards out of them automatically. I used it for Russian for the entire development process, so you can be sure it works well for that.

[1] https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#37

Post by _dmn7 »

For those learning other languages (works best for European languages), my open source tool VocabSieve [1] does something quite similar (it is a lemmatizing tool unlike many common tools such as LingQ), with more advanced features like auto-mining words and using highlights from ereaders. It's also a local-first tool that does not require internet access if you use downloaded resources and does not connect to any central server I control. It has no mobile support though.

[1] https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#39

Post by ammmir »

thanks for making this. i've spent 5 minutes on this, but haven't been able to get it to work yet, the extension popup's Parse and Extract buttons are grayed out. do i need a sub to try it out?

a few general remarks:

the landing page above-the-fold is just ugly, the color gradient is horrendous, and the top screenshot of a video is... blank. at first i tried to click the play button, but nothing happened. then i realized it's more of an abstract illustration of what you app does. makes sense, but a real video or animation would be even straight to the point. please, wow me!

what is mining? at first, i thought you've created a cryptocurrency. i see it's explained later down the page.

after login, the grammar page doesn't respect the light mode theme. more examples for grammar would be helpful. in fact, what i want is, extract relevant grammar from the CC of YouTube videos in Korean, and then link me to the EXACT TIMESTAMP, so i can hear it in actual use. i would pay for this.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#40

Post by harrymit907 »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #21

For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul. It's probably always going to be true that more than 2/3 of your potential customers -- 2/3 of the people who come to the website looking to see if this is for them -- will be in this category. There is a kind of anti-pattern in tools of this kind where the people building them already know so…

I personally think leaving romanization after the first week of learning Hangul is best, unless you are focusing only on getting better at speaking.
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