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Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

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Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#11

Post by claylimo »

sebnun wrote: post #5

Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using podcasts) [1] I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found that I learned much better just reading things in context instead of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator of LingQ) explains this better here [2] [1] https://www.langturbo.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#12

Post by Alex-Programs »

claylimo wrote: post #11
sebnun wrote: post #5

Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using podcasts) [1] I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found that I learned much better just reading things in context instead of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator of LingQ) explains this better here [2] [1] https://www.langturbo.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.

There's also https://nuenki.app (disclaimer: I made it), which applies the same approach to every single website*. It translates appropriate-difficulty sentences into your target language, and you can hover for definitions, pronunciations, etc.

*other than those blocked for privacy reasons

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#13

Post by arbayi »

claylimo wrote: post #11
sebnun wrote: post #5

Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using podcasts) [1] I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found that I learned much better just reading things in context instead of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator of LingQ) explains this better here [2] [1] https://www.langturbo.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.

Thank you for sharing! Looking at their blog, I saw this post about learning Japanese vocabulary (https://migaku.com/blog/japanese/how-to-learn-japanese-vocab...). They share a Japanese Netflix Frequency List - (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15b3j9--RJ1K5hI9vz_2L...)

"To recognize 99% of all the words in Netflix's subtitles, you'd need to know 37,247 words"

Interesting approach! I really don't know how they managed to gather this list, but it's an interesting and clever method.

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#14

Post by arbayi »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #12
claylimo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.

There's also https://nuenki.app (disclaimer: I made it), which applies the same approach to every single website*. It translates appropriate-difficulty sentences into your target language, and you can hover for definitions, pronunciations, etc. *other than those blocked for privacy reasons

I actually want to learn German, but I want to learn it by reading German texts and starting from zero, even though that makes it challenging. I need to look up definitions and such, but translating the entire page defeats the core purpose. This app in my case is just perfect match! Thank you for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#15

Post by Alex-Programs »

arbayi wrote: post #14
Alex-Programs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also https://nuenki.app (disclaimer: I made it), which applies the same approach to every single website*. It translates appropriate-difficulty sentences into your target language, and you can hover for definitions, pronunciations, etc. *other than those blocked for privacy reasons

I actually want to learn German, but I want to learn it by reading German texts and starting from zero, even though that makes it challenging. I need to look up definitions and such, but translating the entire page defeats the core purpose. This app in my case is just perfect match! Thank you for sharing!

Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback!

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#16

Post by davidzweig »

claylimo wrote: post #11
sebnun wrote: post #5

Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using podcasts) [1] I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found that I learned much better just reading things in context instead of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator of LingQ) explains this better here [2] [1] https://www.langturbo.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.

I'll drop this here: If anyone wants to work on Language Reactor (well compensated), my email is in my profile. I'm planning to start open-sourcing much of it soon.

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#17

Post by cat_multiverse »

Hey there, quick suggestion as a PhD Linguistics candidate and avid language learner!

The best way I've found to identify vocabulary most important to my life is through journaling in the language I'm trying to learn. Describing exactly what I did that day, my thoughts, etc, as best I can.

I had thought of doing the journal entries digitally and gathering dictionary headwords from such journal entries, whether they're written in my mother tongue (English) or not, and use the built dictionary lists to drill vocab.

Traditionally you'd use a lemmatizer with a morphosyntactic tagger for the language to identify the dictionary words, but AI is serviceable these days to easily identify dictionary words from long-form text in many languages, though honestly would be surprised if AI outperforms the traditional methods already.

Good luck and have fun :)

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#18

Post by learning-tr »

markvdb wrote: post #2

Thank you for your contribution to the FOSS learning space. Here's a few random suggestions: - spaced repetition. Again, anki style. - audio. Can you make it easy to record a phrase, anki style? Or maybe even make AI pronounce them correctly? I would something like that.

I am learning Turkish so I built something like that for me. You can highlight any word online and it will translate colloquially so you can actually use it irl.

It also has audio and pronunciation. It is around the halfway mark in the demo.

demo: https://imgur.com/a/full-demo-so-far-O2fzBJn

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#19

Post by learning-tr »

cat_multiverse wrote: post #17

Hey there, quick suggestion as a PhD Linguistics candidate and avid language learner! The best way I've found to identify vocabulary most important to my life is through journaling in the language I'm trying to learn. Describing exactly what I did that day, my thoughts, etc, as best I can. I had thought of doing the journal entries digitally and gathering dictionary headwords from such journal entries, whether they'r…

Thoughts on FSI methodology? That's what I used for mine (my app).

Re: Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building

#20

Post by cat_multiverse »

learning-tr wrote: post #19
cat_multiverse wrote: post #17

Hey there, quick suggestion as a PhD Linguistics candidate and avid language learner! The best way I've found to identify vocabulary most important to my life is through journaling in the language I'm trying to learn. Describing exactly what I did that day, my thoughts, etc, as best I can. I had thought of doing the journal entries digitally and gathering dictionary headwords from such journal entries, whether they'r…

Thoughts on FSI methodology? That's what I used for mine (my app).

Honestly had never even heard of it! But adult language acquisition isn't really a domain of study I've ever been interested in. I can only speak to what I have found most helpful in my own adult language acquisition journeys. The journaling method was taught to me by a polyglot friend of mine and it sort of solved the "what actually is my everyday vocabulary anyway" side of language learning for me.
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