I love it!
Q: how do I change my name in the app?
Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
231–240 of 282 posts
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abo…
At that point why engage with an LLM? Just go read a book.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#233this is the future of language learning. love that you guys are working on this. gonna try it out for Indonesian this weekend :)
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#234Thanks for working on this! Language learning really needs a breakthrough. Now, I tried the web app and chose to learn Greek as a beginner. And while I had better experience with your app than with ChatGPT or Gemini voice modes, I still got lost 5 minutes in because the AI tutor doesn't seem to have a plan for me, nor does it "see" my struggles. For example, after asking me about a hobby, it gives me a long sentence…
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/
Agreed, languagetransfer is fantastic. Much better than any "AI tutor".
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abo…
At that point why engage with an LLM? Just go read a book.
Probably too long of an answer, but: averaged out over the months, I spend 30 minutes every weekday doing flashcards, 45 minutes with a tutor, and spend another 1.25 hours watching TV or reading books in my target language. With 2.5 hours every weekday on average and without life immersion (at your home or office) it's possible to get to reading/writing/speaking/understanding fluency (including in terms of speed) in a difficult language in about 3-4 years and near-native in another 2 years. It's very difficult as an English native to learn a language like Chinese, Japanese, or Thai. It's not like learning Spanish or French (which I have also studied). To answer your question directly, surprisingly, reading a book does very little to help your speaking or understanding abilities. The skills of understanding accents/pronunciations quickly enough and the skill of structuring sentences when speaking quickly enough are completely different skills. Writing/reading/speaking/understanding are four remarkably unrelated skills that must be trained separately. Actually, typing on a keyboard and writing by hand are also different. Because thai actually has a different keyboard on desktop vs phone, since it became good enough, I decided to simply use speech to text for the rest of my life. I'm remarkably fluent in comprehension and have read quite a few adult books and yet if you give me a pencil and paper my brain can't figure out how to spell a word that I can easily say or type. And why use an LLM instead of a tutor? To save $2,700 a year.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#236Earlier 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.
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.
Okay I installed it and this is pretty great. Although I think your extension doesn't work for Thai the way you think it does. Because there's spaces between sentences instead of between words in Thai, it's translating entire sentences even with the "words only" setting enabled. This is what I want anyways, but will be too difficult for most learners. I have written misc Thai learning softwares and just so you know you should use an LLM to do word-splitting, not a software library. If you do use a library, you need to split words while looking for the largest possible word, but it won't work well. Basically you can't tell without a brain whether it's a lot of small words next to one another or a smaller number of compound words. IME only an LLM or a human will do a good job of this.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#237I 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…
Yeah Japanese TTS is a lot harder than it looks. I’m also building a language learning application, and constantly ran into incorrect readings. Eleven labs, eleven labs v3, OpenAI, play.ht, azure, google, Polly — I’ve tried them all. They are all really bad (more than 1/3 the expressions had an error in them somewhere).
It _is_ fixable though. It took me about a week, but I have yet to find a mistaken reading now. This also seems to just be the case with Japanese - most tonal languages seem to have the correct tones (I’m not qualified to comment on how natural the tones sound, but I have yet to find a mismatch like in Japanese)
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Natural language acquisition is almost entirely listening and talking
Listening and reading. Talking goes last. See Steve Kaufmann, for example
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds very much like the kinds of mistakes that LLMs typically make. It's a pity, I would love a good language learning platform.
A fundamental problem with language learning built around an LLM is that the one thing you can guarantee is that no two people will have a consistent experience, nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error. That makes it very hard to predict and therefore market what or how people will learn. I think this company will end up pivoting into a B2B context before long. Hopefully they will still stick to the m…
> nor is there ever going to be a 100% freedom-from-error
That is not a problem. Language is messy, you don't need 100% accuracy to learn. The problem is that LLM errors are fundamentally different from human errors, and you won't even know how to recognize them.
Your interlocutors can work around human errors, because they tend to follow the same patterns in same language. But they will freak out with LLM errors.
Re: Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
#240I 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…
Yes. AI transcription is great, AI
translation is OK (depending on language pair), but TTS is still pretty awful for most languages.