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Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

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Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#111

Post by runarberg »

accidentalrebel wrote: post #49

Thank you for sharing this. I've been learning Arabic, and I noticed that the app uses Arabic script right from the start. This can be quite challenging for beginners who haven't learned how to read it yet. May I suggest adding an Englishized (romanized) version of the Arabic text to help ease the learning curve? It also seems to not listen to me when I asked to give me shorter sentences. It seems to not care that I'…

A Japanese learner here (not commenting on this platform). I do recommend start using your target language script as soon as possible, maybe even earlier. The only exception are ideograms where you have to learn like 2000 unique characters, and even then you should learn the most common ones and start using them immediately.

Reading in a non-familiar script becomes much easier the more you do it, and the longer you put off learning it, the more opportunities you miss for using it.

I think you should only be using the latinized scripts in the absolute beginning where you are learning the most basic words and phrases like: “hello”, “yes”, and “no”, and “what is your name?”. This should only be for your first couple of weeks. After that you should have learned to read new words in the new script (albeit slowly). Learning the script makes everything much easier afterwards.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#114

Post by mariano54 »

harles wrote: post #110
mariano54 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do have this issue, but it's improved a bit over chatgpt due to using multiple transcribers. The models are improving though, and they are at a very good place for English at the moment. I expect by next year we will switch over to full voice to voice models.

This reply seems to miss the question, or at least doesn’t answer it clearly. Is this service overly tolerant of mispronunciations? Foundational models are becoming more tolerant, not less, over time which is the opposite of what I’d want in this case.

It's less tolerant of mispronunciations. There is custom promting to explicitly leave in mistakes and to not fix them. It's still not perfect and it (the speech to text module) sometimes corrects the user's pronunciation mistakes.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#117

Post by iandanforth »

antonaf wrote: post #50
iandanforth wrote: post #46

Alright, having tried this with Japanese I can say it's frustrating. As a near complete beginner the tutor kept speaking in Japanese even when I said "sorry I don't understand" repeatedly and then when I asked it to start in English and then gradually transition to Japanese it lasted all of one sentence in English before switching back. I can totally see how this would be useful conversation practice if you've progre…

Yes, I can understand and empathize with your experience. Quite honestly our current focus is more for B1+ students. That 0 -> 1 / bootstrapping of the language is much better served by traditional material that is less talking / listening-heavy.

This is demonstrably false. Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking. The fastest and most consistently effective way to learn a language is immersion. The reason traditional material doesn't attempt immersive techniques is because it is much much easier to print a static book than it is to produce interactive and adaptive content.

The promise and potential of LLM based language learning apps is that you can cross that gap to full immersion in a way that has never been possible before.

Please be more ambitious.

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#118

Post by b3orn »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #10

Luis von Ahn spoke in the early 2010s—probably around 2014—at The LAB in Wynwood, Miami. He recounted how his fascination with crowd-sourcing led first to reCAPTCHA and then to his latest venture, Duolingo. He made it clear that his real passion wasn’t language per se, but building a crowd-sourced human translation service as a business model. At that point, Duolingo had roughly 24 employees—and, much to his surprise…

> (I had ChatGPT fix my grammatical errors and now this comment doesn't sound like me, sorry.)

And it didn't correct "distrupted" to disrupted?

Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

#120

Post by mariano54 »

aizk wrote: post #113

Nice! I'm curious if your software can pick up really subtle details - like for instance, pitch accent in Japanese (which is basically NEVER covered in a beginner level course) but is useful to just be aware of as a language learner.

Thanks! No, it cannot do this yet, as it's using a pipeline of voice to text to voice. I think models are heading in that direction, and voice to voice models are getting better.

For pitch accent, shadowing is a great way to improve. You can pause and repeat the tutors messages for example, or read out the word when doing flashcard reviews (copying the flashcard audio).

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