Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by xzel » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 5:20 AM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #211

sotix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language Transfer[0] will continue to be a better resource than any AI course. It’s very hard to beat a human that has put in time crafting a logical way to teach a language with the appropriate ramp ups. The Greek course on there is fantastic. And it’s free with zero ads. Best language learning tool I’ve ever used period. [0]: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

What's the best way to listen to this on your mobile in a way that will remember your location? SoundCloud app?

They have their own app. It’s pretty minimal but it does save your spot.

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

#222

Post by psychoslave » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 5:27 AM UTC

Looks like a really great job, congratulations.

I'll try to give it a chance later today if I can find some room for it.

My main fear of anticipated deception is that it won't give me feedback on how out of the track my pronunciation can be deemed and lake tips on how to give a nicer moment to a native listening to me. That's really the thing I would like to be able to experiment more than anything else regarding foreign language acquisition. And giving IPA transcription of expected CS actual and possibly some links to video explaining each phonem that went wrong would be top notch.

Regarding engagement, after having try a bunch of online things, to my mind the best formula is to give insights on cultural and social matter: what are the regions of the country¹ and their specificities, what people love as food, drink, music, dance, literature, what have been the historical struggle of the linguistic community, who are the people prised in this community? Well at least for my profile it drives more interest than anything else.

¹ languages are not one to one bound to a single specific country of course, but you get the idea.

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

#223

Post by visarga » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 5:38 AM UTC

I would exercise a new vocabulary by generating many different phrases based on a limited number of known words, like the Pimsleur method. This teaches words in context, not isolated.

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

#224

Post by TypingOutBugs » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:06 AM UTC

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?

Babbel is better than Duolingo!

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

#225

Post by TypingOutBugs » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:10 AM UTC

owebmaster wrote: post #158

deanc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point. This is at best a toy application driven by a prompt that many people will be able to extract and recreate. Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem. Creating magic and making people come back to learn the language is entirely different and I don't see anything magical here.

> Putting the pieces together is easy and letting someone talk to an AI is not a particularly difficult problem Exactly! Not difficult, right? Making and selling a product out of it is called marketing. It is not rocket science, but many engineers can't grasp it. GPT Wrappers are the new CRUD. There is no innovation in Trello, Jira and any other SaaS, they are just marketed products that thousands of people here in H…

Be honest though, what’s the difference between this and a good system prompt in Claude to be a language tutor?

I worked for an Edtech startup before that had a novel approach to mastery (as opposed to Anki) and it’s not something you can put in a prompt.

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

#226

Post by kwkrass » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:14 AM UTC

Well done! I have built a side project in the same space given that i wanted to learn Spanish (my wife is Colombian) and also wasnt happy with existing offerings. I have used the OpenAI realtime API to fully focus on audio conversations. You can check it out (for free) here: http://lucas.alldone.app/

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

#227

Post by 55555 » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #157

55555 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree because of how AI is progressing and because there's tons of neglected language markets they can pick up. Obviously your approach can work too, perhaps better. But 95% of language learning tools don't support Thai (my target language) for example so I am an eager user for that reason alone. I think they'll be able to make a generalized curriculum and have the AI use it in all languages.

Most of the generalized curriculum stuff out there is crap because languages differ from each other in substantial ways. LLMs in principle should help here as they can use their knowledge of the structure of the language to modify, but we're just not there with context windows and thinking capabilities. They will need at least a per-language (ideally per language pair) system prompt that contains a rough outline of t…

I think the curriculum areas you're referring to are for learners in the beginning and intermediate stages. In which case, fair enough, although I still think you could get pretty far by just prompting an LLM, as the LLM has read hundreds of books teaching how to learn each language. But that's not really my point; my point is that once you're an advanced learner (they claim this is their target market) who knows about 12,000 words, I think you know almost all of the grammar, and the remaining bits will get picked up along the way effortlessly via immersion. What you need help with in this stage is slogging through the next 10,000 vocab words you need to learn to get to extreme fluency or the next 25,000 you need to learn to become plausibly native-level, as well as the speaking and reading practice to make your reading faster (if it's a different character set to your native language) and make your speaking effortless.

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

#228

Post by 55555 » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

Alex-Programs wrote: post #77

55555 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree because of how AI is progressing and because there's tons of neglected language markets they can pick up. Obviously your approach can work too, perhaps better. But 95% of language learning tools don't support Thai (my target language) for example so I am an eager user for that reason alone. I think they'll be able to make a generalized curriculum and have the AI use it in all languages.

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.

Thank you, I will try it, although I'd prefer to translate entire sentences into Thai randomly. Perhaps you can add this advanced mode. Actually, I saw your app before while looking for an alternative to Toucan that supported Thai, but at that point in time you hadn't added support yet. Thanks for doing so.

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

#229

Post by 55555 » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #201

Alex-Programs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speci…

What about a whitelist? I might just be interested in only having certain sites, like this one or Reddit, translated into my target language. That way I can be certain it is only turned on for sites that I am OK with sharing browsing history and not be concerned that I might have missed adding something to the blacklist.

This is a great idea. Specifically, I want this enabled when I'm wasting time but not when I'm working. So I'd like it to be enabled only on X.com. This whitelist+blocklist functionality could be a user-side setting like with Adblockers.

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

#230

Post by 55555 » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

antonaf wrote: post #67

55555 wrote: post #66

I'm glad someone is building this! I was using this in Thai. I expected it to be awful. But it's actually very good. I only used it for a few minutes but will try to use it more later. It's possibly good enough for me to stop paying my tutor. However, please use a different Text to Speech model because the current Thai one sounds robotic, like the old (current?) Google Translate. This seems like a great product.

Ok, thanks for the feedback. Who was your tutor for Thai, Supatra or Malee?

I'm sure it was the bangkok one, which I believe is the former.