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

simjanos-dev.github.io

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

#41

Post by bunderbunder »

barrell wrote: post #24
bunderbunder wrote: post #20

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

Easy importing of lessons from YouTube and Netflix, the built-in libraries of lessons, guidance on what content might be most appropriate to your current level based on known vocabulary, the mobile apps with playlists and audio player, things like that.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually used LinguaCafe, but am a longtime LingQ user, so I'm not really making a fair comparison. I know LingQ's feature set much, much better.)

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

#42

Post by justinmayer »

simjanos-dev wrote: post #40
justinmayer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a credited contributor to the EDICT[1] Japanese/English dictionary, I am very pleased to see its successor JMdict[2] actively supported by this project. Bravo! And as someone who now also speaks Italian, I am even more pleased to see that Italian support will be added tomorrow. It is wonderful to see such a useful tool released as an open-source, self-hosted project. (^_^) [1] EDICT: http://edrdg.org/jmdict/edict_…

Hi! Thank you for helping me learn Japanese! :) Can you please explain what do you mean by actively supporting JMDict? I hope I didn't make an attribution mistake, or misunderstood something. My understanding is that I can use those files in my project as long as I follow the license guidelines. It makes me really happy that so many people are interested in it. :)

Sorry for the confusing language choice on my part. I just meant that I think it's great that your project supports JMdict. I think how you are using JMdict is indeed totally okay! :^)

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

#43

Post by simjanos-dev »

justinmayer wrote: post #42
simjanos-dev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thank you for helping me learn Japanese! :) Can you please explain what do you mean by actively supporting JMDict? I hope I didn't make an attribution mistake, or misunderstood something. My understanding is that I can use those files in my project as long as I follow the license guidelines. It makes me really happy that so many people are interested in it. :)

Sorry for the confusing language choice on my part. I just meant that I think it's great that your project supports JMdict. I think how you are using JMdict is indeed totally okay! :^)

Oh, okay. Thank you!

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

#44

Post by mtalantikite »

This looks great! One feature request I'd make is to load up two versions of the same text in both your source and target languages to have them displayed side by side. Bonus would be to have the audiobook as well, or some sort of text to speech. Basically, L-R method (Assimil) [1] but for any book!

[1] https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_M...

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

#45

Post by tenaf0 »

tenaf0 wrote: post #30
barrell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(Misunderstood the question, please ignore my above comment)

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

#46

Post by jchook »

tenaf0 wrote: post #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…

You could potentially use an NLP library like SpaCy, or even bundle with a free fine-tuned LLM like Mistral 7b.

The fine-tuned mistral models are known to out-perform GPT-4 on their specific tasks.

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

#47

Post by jdeisenberg »

simjanos-dev wrote: post #26

Hey guys. I wrote LinguaCafe. I didn't know it was posted here, I've just read it now. I didn't think this many people would be interested. I'll write a guide for Jellyfin, then add Italian, French and Dutch languages tomorrow.

I don’t see a link on that page where I can download the software. (I am exceptionally slow-thinking today, so it may be in a very obvious place and I have overlooked it.)

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

#48

Post by BigElephant »

jdeisenberg wrote: post #47
simjanos-dev wrote: post #26

Hey guys. I wrote LinguaCafe. I didn't know it was posted here, I've just read it now. I didn't think this many people would be interested. I'll write a guide for Jellyfin, then add Italian, French and Dutch languages tomorrow.

I don’t see a link on that page where I can download the software. (I am exceptionally slow-thinking today, so it may be in a very obvious place and I have overlooked it.)

https://github.com/simjanos-dev/LinguaCafe?tab=readme-ov-fil...

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

#49

Post by mdaniel »

katspaugh wrote: post #32

Nice work! It’s great that you can track your progress in this app! When I was learning German, I used the dictionary lookup on Kindle a lot and made a web app to extract that vocabulary as Anki flashcards. It’s available on https://fluentcards.com . The code is open source on GitHub.

because I didn't see any obvious link to said repo, for convenience: https://github.com/katspaugh/fluentcards and https://github.com/katspaugh/fluentcards-grammar

Being the resident licensing pedant, I'll point out that neither of those repos have any licensing information aside from package.json and I doubt gravely that's strong enough for any contributor's comfort level

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

#50

Post by BigElephant »

barrell wrote: post #18
yurishimo wrote: post #11

This looks sweet! The jellyfin integration especially looks awesome as I find watching videos an excellent way to actively absorb new vocabulary. My current self study centers around movies/tv and Linq, which this tool seems very similar to. I'm learning Dutch, so it's a bummer that it's not supported currently, but I'm keen to dig in and see how much effort it takes to add a new language.

If you're shopping around for new ways to learn languages from watching movies/tv, I'm working on another language learning application. I just wrote up the basic features this weekend [1] We support many languages out of the box, would love to hear what's making you consider LinguaCafe over LingQ :) [1] https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look/

Hello, when do you plan on launching the beta version?
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