31–40 of 71 posts
From my research, the best language learning program is Anki. It is open source and one can make custom 'decks' fairly simply. Perhaps a dictionary add-on for Anki would be good idea?
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 bein…
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 m…
(E.g., your vocabuo website prominently points to possible promo codes.)
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 bein…
I’ve had this same idea, and it doesn’t work. Or at least: it works quote well, but the problem is that you get hallucinations. And it can be incredibly discouraging to find out the flashcards you’ve been cramming are completlh wrong.
I was asking only for the meanings of the words and phrases, though. I didn’t ask for things like pronunciations, grammatical categories, etc. In the past, when I’ve tried to get that kind of granular information from LLMs, there were indeed errors, presumably because of tokenization issues.
A few days ago, I ran some similar tests with Japanese, asking for readings of kanji and jukugo in an extended text. All of the models I had tried before for such tasks had screwed up. This time, however, ChatGPT o1 scored 100%. It also was able to analyze sentence grammar accurately, unlike the other models I tried. I was impressed.
At current API prices, though, o1 might be a bit too expensive for such a task.
* https://www.appicenter.net/Apps/VocabES/ * https://www.appicenter.net/Apps/VocabEN/
Uses Spaced Repetition and Audio but is not personalized which is less of an issue for basic words. The hard part is getting good example sentences and "cross links". I had though about use AI for that but have not followed through.
I'm on a Duolingo family plan, studying Ukrainian. It keeps throwing more and more difficult words without really building my knowledge and experience with the previous words.
I'm not sure if I can't hear the words correctly (it's possible, I'm partially deaf and it sounds like the voices it provides are low quality). I'm not sure if I'm not pronouncing them correctly (it often doesn't accept my pronunciations). Its feedback for improvement is extremely limited. For example, no matter how hard or slow or fast I pronounce it, it pretty much never accepts один ("oden" = "one") when I speak it.
When I was in 3rd through 6th grade of school, I learned English pronunciations using Spalding phonetics [0]. There are about 70 or so English phonemes if I recall. It would be handy to have that for other languages. It specifically taught how to put letters together to form sounds, and which combinations of letters are synonymous for sounds (but not for spelling, which was a separate class based much more on memorization of rules and exceptions). I excelled in both of these classes.
I've also sometimes asked ChatGPT for translations of words. It seems semi-OK. But it's much better to ask Ukrainian friends and colleagues. Friends and colleagues don't have a lot of time or patience to teach though. And they'd often throw additional meaning or context that was difficult to understand (for example, English has much less assignment of gender to words).
Not too much later in life (8th grade or so), I started writing software. I was homeschooled then, and had a lot of time on my hands. So I'd write software for most of the day every day for months at a time. There came a point where I stopped thinking in English and started thinking in objects and code relationships. I didn't realize it until my mother asked me what I was doing and I had to think to translate to English.
I've heard similar anecdotes: you start to become a native speaker when you can think in that language. I want that from Duolingo but haven't yet achieved it after 2.5 years. I imagine what's missing is just as @cat_multiverse said [1]: I don't really use the Ukrainian language in my daily life and should just start doing so even if it's just a journal. But without any feedback about correct pronunciation or grammar I worry that I would end up with my own mini language instead of truly a Ukrainian one.
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
Some thoughts I'm on a Duolingo family plan, studying Ukrainian. It keeps throwing more and more difficult words without really building my knowledge and experience with the previous words. I'm not sure if I can't hear the words correctly (it's possible, I'm partially deaf and it sounds like the voices it provides are low quality). I'm not sure if I'm not pronouncing them correctly (it often doesn't accept my pronunc…