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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

#191

Post by ChadNauseam »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #83
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #2

>We didn’t want to focus too much on gamification. Thank you so much for this. Duolingo is literally unbearable because it's so gamified. I'll try it out later. I've seen a few of these apps, can I seamlessly go between my native language and the language I'm trying to learn? If I am trying to learn Hindi, can I ask a question in English in the middle of a conversation?

The app is optimized on the whole population, not on individual level. They even publish papers on global optimization. These kinds of learning apps are destined to become mediocre over time. The learning metric is so easy to capture, the learning content so easy to produce, yet no one has an individualized loop to make learning work well. For example, I'd press "Training" on Duolingo, and would get nowhere. Same les…

Duolingo is laughably inefficient. I have an app I've made for myself to learn french, and it's amazing how little effort is required to make something 10x better. (I completed the french Duolingo tree and learned essentially nothing so I feel justified in saying that.) If you're learning french, let me know and I'll add you to the app.

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

#192

Post by deadbabe »

owebmaster wrote: post #163
deadbabe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like the story of the businessman and the fisherman. Why on earth are you going to build out a whole product: doing marketing, security, incorporation, customer support, etc… just so you can finally arrive at the end result of… teaching yourself a language? The toy app is 100% of the value. You don’t need all that other shit, you just need a really good prompt. It’s exactly how you don’t need to search websit…

you think a chat UI is the apex UX? Most of us don't agree with that. On top of that, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini apps all sucks.

You don’t get it, you can just tell an AI to build you a UI as some html page and use that.

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

#193

Post by cpursley »

mariano54 wrote: post #101
cpursley wrote: post #80

This is the language app I've always wanted to exist. Will try it out - really hoping it can create custom lessons for specific scenarios that I need to study for.

You should try re-generating a custom curriculum from the settings, and there you can prompt it to create specific lesson types.

Which specific settings should I modify?

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

#194

Post by xmodem »

I’m at a roughly A2 - B1 level at the language I’m learning and I picked up a whole lot of pretty basic grammar errors in the first conversation.

The app also used a bunch of constructions I’m not familiar with even though I specified I’m a beginner.

If I hired a human tutor and had this experience, I would ask for my money back.

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

#195

Post by Alex-Programs »

adastra22 wrote: post #160
Alex-Programs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tool supports Thai, if you'd like to try it - https://nuenki.app . I added it at the request of a user, who seems to be happy with it. It's a browser extension that finds English sentences in webpages, and translates the ones at your difficulty level into the language you're learning.

That's a pretty sick idea. Unfortunately I presume it involves sending your browsing data (e.g. page contents) to the server?

Yeah, though I've added lots of privacy protections to at least partially mitigate that:

- There's a global blacklist of sites, as well as phrases in the title/URL (e.g. "bank")

- You can blacklist sites yourself

- Each sentence is run against filters checking for medical/legal/etc info, as well as checks for addresses, card/social security numbers, etc. All the checks are done client side

- There are also some special implementations, e.g. it looks at the source code of websites to work out if they're an instance of an American health portal that I've forgotten the name of - each doctor's surgery self-hosts it.

- Websites can add `nuenki-ignore=true` on their end, if they'd like to disable it.

And of course it doesn't log anything, though there is an anonymous cache in order to make it economical.

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

#196

Post by mariano54 »

xmodem wrote: post #194

I’m at a roughly A2 - B1 level at the language I’m learning and I picked up a whole lot of pretty basic grammar errors in the first conversation. The app also used a bunch of constructions I’m not familiar with even though I specified I’m a beginner. If I hired a human tutor and had this experience, I would ask for my money back.

I'm sorry about that. May I ask what language you tried?

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

#197

Post by xmodem »

mariano54 wrote: post #196
xmodem wrote: post #194

I’m at a roughly A2 - B1 level at the language I’m learning and I picked up a whole lot of pretty basic grammar errors in the first conversation. The app also used a bunch of constructions I’m not familiar with even though I specified I’m a beginner. If I hired a human tutor and had this experience, I would ask for my money back.

I'm sorry about that. May I ask what language you tried?

Swedish

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

#198

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #175
iandanforth wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. No, that's not correct. First off, you can provide immersion with static books. A common favorite here on HN is Lingua Latina per se illustrata ["the Latin tongue explained by itself"]. Second off, there are two reasons that traditional…

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by masspro »

I don't think I can trust TTS for language learning. I could be internalizing wrong pronunciation, and I wouldn't know. One time I tried Duolingo for Japanese already knowing a bit. To their credit I assumed it was recorded clips, until it read 'oyogu' as something like 'oyNHYAOgu', like it concatenated two syllable clips that don't go together. If I didn't already know, would I be trying to study and replicate that nonsense? So I don't know if I could trust TTS audio for language study regardless of what kind of tech it is. Sure mistakes can be unlearned over time spent immersing, but at much more effort than just not internalizing them in the first place.

Also Japanese specifically has this meme where it literally is a pitch-accent language but many people say it's not and teaching resources ignore it. E.g. 'ima' means either 'now' or 'living room' depending if syllable #2 is higher or lower. Clearly only applies to some languages, but is another dimension even harder to a learner to know there's a mistake. I have to imagine even other Latin languages probably have reading quirks where this could happen to me.

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