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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

#21
post #6
post #4

Apologies if this answered in the readme but does this support other languages than English?

Hi! I actually forgot to mention this in the README, thank you for pointing it out. The app would work for any language, but the definitions and exercises will be written in English. I created a list just now for German words and added the German word "Zeitreise". It generated this definition: > Exercises were asked in English. "What does "Zeitreise" mean?": - Time travel - Train journey - Long wait - Difficult puzzl…

Abi, slick design!

A feature where it supports TR -> EN and vice versa would be amazing!

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

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tl;dr "The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the primary training institution to prepare American diplomats to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests, teaching, among other things, the languages of the countries where Foreign Service Officers will serve. "

Apologies, I should have linked beforehand.

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

#23
Interesting approach! Thanks for making it open-source, I think we need more open-language language learning tools. As I'm also building one (https://github.com/laurentlb/lingostories/), I'm going to take a look at what you did and the technical decisions.

You seem to focus on the English use-case. In my experience, getting exposure to other languages can be much more difficult, especially when you're not fluent yet. It would be interesting to see how to approach it: ideally, questions and answers should be in the target language, but the questions have to be very simple.

As someone else mentioned, having audio would be very useful. At some point, you could consider a hand-free mode: it reads the question out loud, pauses a few seconds, then tells the response.

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

#24
post #3

This looks neat. If you’re going to add Duolingo style features, please don’t add fill-in-the-blank or word matching to the question types; or at least make them optional. They are an incredibly frustrating waste of time on Duolingo—they take up a ton of time to solve and don’t actually improve comprehension. My biggest gripe with Duolingo is that half of the questions asked in a lesson are questions like these which…

Out of curiosity, do have any citations on how those exercises don't enable learning?

On the latter part, there used to be a hard mode at least in browser mode where you could have it force you hand type every word. I always really liked that, but then they got rid of it. Of course with the heart system these days, I wouldn't last 5 minutes if I tried to do it that way so such is life I suppose

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

#25
This looks really good. I wish I had had something like this many years ago when I was studying languages.

Somebody has already suggested adding spaced repetition and audio, which I agree with completely.

One more suggestion: In addition to having the LLM give you the meaning and example for the context in which you originally saw the word, also ask it to provide the word’s other main meanings and examples of it being used in those senses. You might encounter a word first in a slang or technical sense; while it’s useful to learn that meaning, it’s also important to learn other, more common meanings.

Below are some examples of words you might encounter first in technical contexts but would also be worth knowing in their more general meanings. (Examples suggested and defined by ChatGPT o1.)

canonical

Religious/General: Relating to a canon (e.g., church law) or a recognized body of works.

Math/Computing: Conforming to a standard or simplest form (e.g., “canonical form” of an equation).

resolution

General: A firm decision or determination (often heard in “New Year’s resolution”).

Tech/Imaging: The detail an image holds, typically measured in pixels, dots per inch (DPI), etc.

protocol

Diplomatic/General: The official procedure or set of rules governing state or ceremonial events.

Computing: A set of conventions and rules for transmitting data between electronic devices.

flux

General: Continuous movement or change, often implying instability.

Physics/Engineering: The amount of some quantity (e.g., heat, magnetism) passing through a given area over time.

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

#27
As someone who's learning a language (french) with Duolingo, and also supplementing that with other methods (podcasts, social media, online chatting, talking to chatgpt) I've also really wanted a way to get duolingo type experience with my own set of vocabulary that I encounter. So i'll definitely check this out. Also your english is impressive!

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

#29
post #28

This is nice! (100th star I pressed!) I'd like to try it, but the setup was a pain, it would be nice to have a button to deploy immediately to Vercel and Supabase! ref: https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/deploy-button

I thought it was a great idea! I also often use the Vercel Deploy button because it allows me to try things out quickly.

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

#30
Great app! I've been building something similar, but for less advanced language learners, who wouldn't understand definitions in their target language.

My app [1] is basically a combination of SRS flashcards with an ebook/YouTube/Website reader. Unlike Anki though, AI creates example sentences, definitions, images and audio.

I find it interesting that you want to get inspired by Duolingo. My approach is to have the most efficient grind possible - no gamification. I've found Duolingo was wasting so much of my time with exercises that did not really teach me anything and took a long time to complete + the XP points/levels etc. were quite distracting.

[1] https://vocabuo.com

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