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Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

phrasing.app

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Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#91

Post by barrell »

filleduchaos wrote: post #88

"Every language" sounds like a massive stretch. Then again I come from a country of 200+ different languages, so maybe my expectations are a tad higher than most. Unfortunately, given the reliance on machine translations, I don't expect it to be a useful learning tool for most of those languages any time soon. As an aside I'm curious about your voices, especially for highly tonal languages like Yoruba that also don't…

While we offer people the ability to do machine translations, there's absolutely no reliance on them. We actively advise against using machine translations when onboarding new users

It's a good point about the "every language" part. That's really the goal of the project - we've been adding about 20 languages a month since we started, and don't plan to stop until we support every language. However we're not there yet, give us a few more months to live up to that ;)

We have some ideas for languages that don't have widely available TTS, but we're not ready to share anything quite yet.

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#92

Post by barrell »

klipt wrote: post #71
boerseth wrote: post #32

> The hardest part about learning a language is knowing what to learn. I disagree with this. The hardest part about learning a language is finding content and resources in the target language that are both engaging and comprehensible at your current level. It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient. The parts of the lan…

> It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient. Children's books? Children also learn from scratch. I think an adult reading books targeted to progressively higher ages would do reasonably.

My experience from learning from childrens books has not been very good. They tend to be quite whimsical, which is hard to follow, use quite old language, which is hard to follow, and use really child-appropriate language, which is hard to follow.

Getting to a middle-school or YA level though, and increasing through reading levels there, is probably the best thing you can do for your language (and phrasing was built specifically to make this level accessible to you before your language level is high enough).

PS: Childrens books work on Phrasing too, so this isn't inherently biased in that respect, just my genuine opinion.

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#93

Post by barrell »

wackget wrote: post #79

The regular homepage is super laggy for me. It also doesn't explain what the product actually is . For example, I clicked on "TV shows" and it says: > Just search for your favorites > You type in the name of the TV show you want to watch, and we'll do the heavy lifting. With over one million episodes at your fingertips, we've got you covered. So... is this app a media streaming service? Does it host all this content…

I mean, I'm sorry your experience wasn't great. But this is fantastic feedback, so thank you for that.

We're working on an FAQ section, we'll make sure these are all answered there. If you were genuinely asking here, I'm also happy to go through each point individually.

Although the 2 most important things: yes everything is legal, no we try to stay away from AI generation for the core product (although we allow it of course)

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#94

Post by barrell »

gxonatano wrote: post #89

Impressive project, but the tagline says "learn every language," and yet there are some very glaring omissions. Just a few off the top of my head: Haitian Creole, Breton, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Scots, and Yoruba. But probably the biggest omission is Esperanto, the world's most popular auxiliary language, which is often used as a bridge to other languages. If you learn Esperanto as your first foreign language, it's…

Heh yeah that was just brought to my attention. It's kind of always been the mission of the project, and what we've been building internally. We've been adding 20 languages a month since we started, and we're not planning on stopping anytime soon - but indeed there are a lot of language missing at the moment.

By the time we're out of beta we will support every language, give us a couple months to make good on that headline!

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#95

Post by barrell »

sgc wrote: post #50
barrell wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will look into Albanian! We have some ideas on how to remove the language restrictions sometime this year. When it comes to educational content, one of the things I'm most excited for is to have the stuff I'm learning hooked up into an SRS _and_ in another language. Not only will I remember things better because I'm learning it in another language, but I'll learn the other language better because I'm interested in…

There will be two broad types of people: those with interest in fiction, and those who prefer non-fiction. The more you can offer something from each group, and from a few different genres / areas in those subgroups, the more people will be able to find their sweet spot. For extra credit, analyze which subjects each person is learning the best from, and give them more of that. Eventually you should be able to find pa…

For what it's worth, we're cooking up a lot of fun stuff with vector embeddings along these lines. For now we've decided on getting the product stable and launched, although everything is set up to go in this direction.

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#96

Post by barrell »

chankstein38 wrote: post #65

So what does it actually do to youtube videos? The landing page doesn't cover this. Should I expect that the video I watch will be in my target language now? As in, it'll be dubbed in the new language? That'd be super useful but I'm unclear and I'm not paying $10 to find out. A time-limited example or something similar would be really useful. Maybe just one that you pick. Whatever it may be, I'd love to see how it ac…

We're definitely going to get there! For what it's worth, nobody has been signed on yet without receiving a tour and demonstration of the product, and nor would I expect anyone to pay money without having seen the product.

Sometime this week or next we will work on recording videos of the whole experience, and making them available. Then another thing to do this quarter is automatic payments, payment portals, trials, etc.

We didn't think we should delay 'launching' any longer though.

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#97

Post by barrell »

docorc wrote: post #33

Can you add Tamil as well, it’s one of the oldest Indian Languages much like Sanskrit and has millions of Tamil Speaker spread all across South East Asia and has big Bollywood industry with lots of shows. Recently been trying to find a good app for my kids and Tamil is always missing from most language apps.

We support Tamil :) I don't think we have any voices added for Tamil, but it's possible that a Tamil speaker voice clone in Hindi could be sufficient. Would love to try!

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#99

Post by wahnfrieden »

steve1977 wrote: post #39
clbrmbr wrote: post #27

I look forward to giving user feedback when I’m able to signup. > our Humane Spaced repeition system. Based off of the popular FSRS, our Spaced Repeition System will adapt to your review style. Take a few weeks off? No problem. Want to study ahead one day? No problem. Took a 2 year vacation? We're jealous, but we've got you covered. I really resonate with this. I find that after a long break, I have forgotten a lot l…

Well for one thing, Anki is using an ancient SuperMemo algorithm. I wouldn’t take Anki as a benchmark in terms of spaced repetition effectiveness.

anki doesn't use the ancient sm algo anymore

anki uses fsrs but afaik it still "punishes" you for taking breaks

Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level

#100

Post by wmil »

barrell wrote: post #58
wmil wrote: post #35

`env.js` is returning html for me and thus throwing an error. Is it working for everyone else? Is this a cloudflare config problem?

hahaha this is a debugging trick we use to be able to run production builds locally through proxy servers :) is it causing issues for you (besides logging a 404)?

The phrases weren't loading for me and it was the most obvious problem. They are working now.
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