Didn’t seem to work. “Load failed” when I entered my email address. Then “email rate limit exceeded” when I tried again
Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
111–120 of 126 posts
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nicely said. It seems like you're familiar with Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis? My daughter speaks German and Swedish very proficiently just from watching hours and hours over a few years of ZDF/ARD/usw (German tv networks) and Barnakalan (Swedish kids network) on the iPad. I can't say it was a wise to let her be on the iPad for that many hours a day, but it did work, she did acquire the languages.
> Barnakalan Barnkanalen (Barn = children, kanalen = "the channel")
Yep! Early morning typo. Thanks
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nicely said. It seems like you're familiar with Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis? My daughter speaks German and Swedish very proficiently just from watching hours and hours over a few years of ZDF/ARD/usw (German tv networks) and Barnakalan (Swedish kids network) on the iPad. I can't say it was a wise to let her be on the iPad for that many hours a day, but it did work, she did acquire the languages.
Yes! I'm a big fan, and have even tested the theory out on myself to great effect. I learned French using the series "French in Action", along with certain other sources of input. I was watching and rewatching each episode, and listening on repeat to its audio which I downloaded. Less than a year in I was listening to the radio, and now, two years in, I can listen and read to almost anything online. I'm behind on mor…
How many hours a day were you putting in?
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
As an adult, finding children's books to be engaging is... well, a tad difficult.
I used to think the same, and I admit that having children yourself is deff a factor, but I have been surprised by how good kids books and shows can be these days.
Nothing to do when I was a kid, so I would not rule it out.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#115"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,…
Ah! To be clear I was going off of other comments, and also omitted some of the steps in my logic. Basically I mean that the project seems to rely on third-party-sourced translations of material which are themselves often machine-translated, and that support for new languages seems to be added through machine translation (though I suppose these days we call it AI instead). To be clear this is as opposed to something like Duolingo, which hires humans to translate its available material.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#116"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,…
> 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
You know there are about 7000 languages in the world, right? Most of them with 0 or near 0 presence on the internet.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. As a native speaker, I found these examples to be weird at best. No way any native would write or speak like that.
When we built this demo we figured the official translations would be well translated, apparently they are not. Some people elsewhere in the comments are saying it's just a weird English sentence so it has a weird French sentence. My French is no good enough to critique on it's nativeness though
""Toujours faire quelque chose" vous amènera à trouver le travail de votre vie de la même façon que la gravité amène l'eau jusqu'au trou dans votre toit."
(Paul Graham is a very poor writer, and his image doesn't mean much to Europeans, who don't live much in individual, shoddily-made houses the way Americans do)
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
As others pointed out, SM-2 is apparently still the default.
FSRS would indeed be more interesting, as it seems to be heavily “inspired” by SM-18.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#119I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks. With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律 Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as…
Honestly, I would not recommend it for Japanese/Chinese atm. We're aware the quality there is really not good. We'll have to spend a couple months dedicated to these languages specifically to clean them up. Still, we don't want to stop our users from learning any language with it, even if it's not well supported. But I've been very transparent with any of our beta testers that Chinese/Japanese are not going to be a g…
I want to know how well supported each language is. Rate support as Alpha, Beta, Full so I can decide if I want to use your app.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#120This looks really nice, I built something similar, mostly focused on podcasts now:
I built something more complex before, that had YouTube content, AI shadowing tests, some built in SRS, but I chose to focus on the most important things first.
I actually started building my app due to the frustration of not finding any "intermediate level" apps. Good to see more options out there. Good luck.