Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simjanos-dev.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 83 posts

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

#61

Post by barrell »

BigElephant wrote: post #50
barrell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm onboarding my second cohort of beta applicants this week, I hope to have a public beta by the end of the quarter or so!

I noticed a lot of signups from this post, I'll try to do another round of onboarding this month.

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

#63

Post by clbrmbr »

barrell wrote: post #61
BigElephant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm onboarding my second cohort of beta applicants this week, I hope to have a public beta by the end of the quarter or so! I noticed a lot of signups from this post, I'll try to do another round of onboarding this month.

I would be delighted to beta test. I would want to work on my spoken Portuguese so I could interact more naturally with my Brazilian colleagues.

I study French, German, Swedish, Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Latin, dabbling in Polish, though it’s hard to find shows dubbed in Latin :). Someday will get to Russian and maybe learn Icelandic as a way of getting closer to the roots of English… but alas life is not forever.

I’ve written some LLM-based software for generating podcasts (www.anyglot.com, but the server currently offline). This project showed me that GPT4 is excellent at generating content in English, and in doing various NLP tasks but not translation which was better left for Google. ElevenLabs voices are fantastic but their Japanese would invent weird Kanji readings, tho that was when Multilingual V2 just came out so maybe they’ve fixed that already.

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

#64

Post by simjanos-dev »

nexawave-ai wrote: post #33
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.

This is very cool. Yes, please add French and Dutch. Dankjewel!

Hi!

French and Dutch are added.

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

#65

Post by simjanos-dev »

burkaman wrote: post #10

This is incredibly cool. I have been trying to do this exact workflow manually by reading something in Kindle and copy/pasting to DeepL and Anki and it sucks. If the author is here, I'm wondering if you would be open to PRs for other languages? I'd like to try this for French or Italian.

Hi!

I've added French and Italian.

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

#66

Post by simjanos-dev »

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.

Hi!

I've added Dutch.

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

#67

Post by simjanos-dev »

huimang wrote: post #7

This is something I've thought about building for a while. I would definitely use it if there were a Korean option!

Hi!

I've added Korean as an "experimental" language. You can try it out if you would like to.

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

#68

Post by simjanos-dev »

Beijinger wrote: post #31
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.

Chinese please.

Hi!

I've added Chinese. However i couldn't find a dictionary for it yet, and it might need a custom font for Chinese characters. DeepL works with it as well. If it has issues, I will fix it soon.

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

#69

Post by simjanos-dev »

yellow_lead wrote: post #6

Looks great. I would love to give it a try if it had Chinese support. The japanese support looks good though, maybe another reason to try learning.

Hi!

I've added Chinese as an "experimental" language. I couldn't find a dictionary for it yet, and it might need a custom font type. DeepL works as well. I will fix the font issue soon.

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

#70

Post by ipsi »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #57
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://e…

FWIW, English Wikitionary (appears to!) have fewer words than German Wiktionary. I've run into this trying to extract words from eBooks (then converting to the "base" form, to essentially de-duplicate). I think it's mostly compound or more niche words, but I imagine you'd still run into them at least occasionally with most written works.

There's a nice project for converting and extracting the data from English Wiktionary into JSON but it doesn't support any other languages, AFAIK, which is a bit of a shame but also not very surprising - Wiktionary is a lot more complex, technically, than I expected!

Post reply on HN