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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

#51

Post by wahnfrieden »

tracnar wrote: post #25
bunderbunder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Manabi Reader app is a browser

https://reader.manabi.io

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

#52

Post by kegs_ »

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.

How are you using the service on a boox tablet? Follow-up, what kind of battery draw does it have on the tablet?

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

#53

Post by simjanos-dev »

kegs_ wrote: post #52
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.

How are you using the service on a boox tablet? Follow-up, what kind of battery draw does it have on the tablet?

I installed it on a PC, and access it from my tablet's browser. I do not know how much battery draw it has.

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

#54

Post by ipsi »

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…

Interesting! I have a partially-built, related, tool, to extract "words" from e-books, so I could build flashcard lists and make sure I knew the majority of words that were used - most of them would be common words but every book has a decently-sized selection of specialised vocabulary. I did think about trying to get something fancy done with an LLM or an NLP for figuring out the separable verbs, but in the end, I took a very... brute-force approach, basically grabbing the final word in the "phrase", then prepending that to every word in the phrase one by one and asking "is this a known separable verb?" - I'm not sure how well it worked, but that's a different story.

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

#55

Post by ipsi »

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 think the Jellyfin integration could be more than just a niche feature. I've used https://www.languagereactor.com/, but that only supports Netflix & YouTube, which is a bit limiting.

Reasons it's useful: * If you've got both Native & Target Language subtitles, you can see a natural translation if you're struggling to understand something * If there isn't a Native translation, then you can machine-translate one - especially useful early on to catch common idioms/etc that aren't just the sum of each individual word. * Jellyfin also supports eBooks, although its reader isn't great - but if someone has already built their library, it would be nice to be able to re-use it somehow.

I would be very interested in seeing that particular feature expand, but I don't imagine it's at all simple!

Tangentially related, but I could see some desire for Calibre support as well, somehow. Calibre was very much designed to be completely stand-alone and it doesn't really support other apps trying to read its database, but it is possible.

I'd also really like some language-specific features, like separable-verb handling for German (see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915786) - it's relatively important and lacking support really limits the usefulness of vocab tools. It would also be a nightmare to handle for subtitles, since it's not always clear where a sentence ends, but such is life - subtitles are sadly not aimed at language leaners. For books and not-terrible Podcast transcripts, though, it wouldn't be so bad.

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

#56

Post by novagameco »

zerop wrote: 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.

What about writing? With Korean, learning to sound out the characters is usually the first step, even if you don't know what the words mean. I'm trying to learn some Thai within the next 10 months or so and I heard it's the same way (learn to read first)

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

#57

Post by seabass-labrax »

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 have my full support for your project, as I think natural language processing is a very exciting and underutilised technology for language learning. But if you want a low-tech solution, I've found Wiktionary to be ideal. Wiktionary has all the declensions and prefixes for German verbs; to use your example:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/f%C3%A4ngt_an

tells you what the word is, and gives a link back to:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anfangen#German

I chose to add Wiktionary to Kiwix Android (8GB download) for offline use. In addition, I can search by right-clicking or tap+holding on a word. All that information is available because of the (mostly manual) work done by Wiktionary contributors, but it reaches a very high standard. There is usually more digression and explanation for the usage notes in Wiktionary than, say, Collins German-English dictionary, which is a rather good thing for language learners.

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

#58

Post by jszymborski »

Super smart idea. I ostensibly do this sort of thing manually to expand my vocabulary in other languages I speak.

What does adding a new language involve other than adding a dictionary? It doesn't seem like there are too many language-specific features at first blush.

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

#59

Post by gstamp »

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

Importing audio along with the text is a big one. Failing that some sort of TTS would be very useful.

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

#60

Post by simjanos-dev »

ipsi wrote: post #55
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 think the Jellyfin integration could be more than just a niche feature. I've used https://www.languagereactor.com/ , but that only supports Netflix & YouTube, which is a bit limiting. Reasons it's useful: * If you've got both Native & Target Language subtitles, you can see a natural translation if you're struggling to understand something * If there isn't a Native translation, then you can machine-translate one - e…

Hi!

I thought of it as a niche feature because I thought most of the users would come from language learning communities, where most people are not into self-hosting. So even if someone would set up a server just for this, chances are they do not have or interested in Jellyfin also. But I've seen several comments about it, and it seems like a lot of people are from the self-hosting community so maybe it's more popular.

I'm also planning to support YouTube and improve on Jellyfin support, but I'll work on other issues and features first.

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