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LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

simjanos-dev.github.io

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#21
post #19

Looks good! I've been thinking about building something similar but as a desktop app (and maybe browser extension) which would work with whatever text you have on the screen. It seems doable by (ab)using the OS accessibility APIs. I find it hard to stick to importing text, reading them in the app, and marking the words. Having something which works in the background and can tell you where you've previously seen words…

Are you familiar with Language Reactor or Migaku? I think there are a couple others too. They're all implemented as browser extensions, but that works out pretty well because most content that's useful for language learning gets accessed through a browser these days, anyway.

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#22

Wouldn't "self hosted software" just be software?

It specifically refers to client/server software where the server-side component is run within one's own server environment, and usually describes FOSS alternatives to SaaS webapps.

Normal desktop applications aren't self-hosted, as they aren't hosted in this sense to begin with.

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#23
My method of learning new languages is always by starting to learn everyday conversations in the language.

1. Learn the translation of the commonly used everyday words

2. Learn the rule to build sentences in different tenses (Verb conjugation)

3. Keep practising in everyday conversations, starting with most simple ones and gradually learn more.

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#24

Very nice. This clearly takes a lot of inspiration from LingQ, but fixes some of LingQ's more glaring challenges such as letting you use a real dictionary, instead of relying on definitions that were crowdsourced from other learners using the app. (And therefore full of quality problems an inaccuracies.) On the other hand, it sounds like some nice features aren't implemented yet, or maybe not even planned, so maybe L…

I’d be curious to hear what niceties you feel LingQ has that it’s missing if you don’t mind sharing

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#25
post #19

Looks good! I've been thinking about building something similar but as a desktop app (and maybe browser extension) which would work with whatever text you have on the screen. It seems doable by (ab)using the OS accessibility APIs. I find it hard to stick to importing text, reading them in the app, and marking the words. Having something which works in the background and can tell you where you've previously seen words…

Are you familiar with Language Reactor or Migaku? I think there are a couple others too. They're all implemented as browser extensions, but that works out pretty well because most content that's useful for language learning gets accessed through a browser these days, anyway.

I wasn't, they look interesting thank you, I'll try it out! Indeed the browser is the most important, even though it would be nice to have something generic for any app.

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#27
post #23

My method of learning new languages is always by starting to learn everyday conversations in the language. 1. Learn the translation of the commonly used everyday words 2. Learn the rule to build sentences in different tenses (Verb conjugation) 3. Keep practising in everyday conversations, starting with most simple ones and gradually learn more.

Regarding 2. i noticed that when learning french, once you know how to form proper questions, conversations take a quantum leap. It also helps to learn the 30ish verbs that are the most important. Good luck.

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#29
I have been working on a similar project on-and-off in my spare time, the only remotely interesting feature that other similar software may not have is that it actually tries to parse/analyze sentences (with an NLP lib). It's made specifically for German, and the reason why I wanted to make it is that no existing software managed to handle separable verbs properly - for example learning "Wir fangen jetzt an." is just wrong if you learn it as 'fangen' and 'an' separately, you actually care about 'anfangen', dictionary-wise.

It unfortunately does have false-positives (a complete solution would require LLMs, I believe over the much less complicated NLP algorithms - I just don't want to send whole books to ChatGPT, as that would quickly become expensive), but I found it usable, so I made it public now: https://github.com/tenaf0/lwt

I don't want to "advertise" it even more, as the NLP lib is run by academia as a free service, and I don't want to overburden it (I have been planning on hosting it myself, but didn't yet get there).

Re: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

#30
post #24

Very nice. This clearly takes a lot of inspiration from LingQ, but fixes some of LingQ's more glaring challenges such as letting you use a real dictionary, instead of relying on definitions that were crowdsourced from other learners using the app. (And therefore full of quality problems an inaccuracies.) On the other hand, it sounds like some nice features aren't implemented yet, or maybe not even planned, so maybe L…

I’d be curious to hear what niceties you feel LingQ has that it’s missing if you don’t mind sharing

Last time I checked, it couldn’t handle expressions that are not just tokens one after the other. For example, German separable verbs. I tried fixing it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915786
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