Don't you worry that the ways of language acquisition that work for ultra-polyglots would necessarily work for regular people?
Why? Everyone acquires language the same way.
Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#22I don't understand what this is. This landing page actually made me annoyed :) . I doubt you will get many conversions based on current landing page. > Try clicking around on some of the words below - and make sure to give the audio a listen! OP I clicked on the text and bunch of tags popped up. I wasn't sure what those tags are or what I am supposed to do after that.
Please be kind. That doesn't stop you being critical, but try and be kind and more helpful. What's confusing? It's clearly a language learning app, with various features that it seems like the landing page leads you through. The HN link is to the playground, which also does explain things. Where are you getting stuck? Perhaps these may help OP improve the page. edit - I see the comment has been updated to be softened…
You are right. I added some feedback for OP about where I got stuck.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#23Congrats on the launch! As of now it feels like your target audience, or at least those that would understand what this might be, are people that probably have already spent a lot of time in language learning communities and understand some of what you're going for. For instance, I see "Shadowing" on one of the pages as a feature, which, if I wasn't aware of Alexander Arguelles' work, I'd have no idea what this was. Same with a lot of this parallel text stuff, if I didn't own Assimil courses I might not know that having parallel texts is a powerful way of learning. I think it could be helpful to break down how this would work more clearly for people that might not have much background in these sorts of methods.
I'd be really interested in trying this out if you had Bengali as a language option. It's a notoriously underrepresented language by language learning publishers, despite being the 6th most spoken language in the world [1] with a very rich, 1000+ year history of poetry and a people that literally fought a war in some part for their language [2].
Again, congrats on the launch -- now comes the hard part!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#24I don’t know where the translations are coming from, but the quality of the Turkish/English translation was lacking. Unfortunately, It does not inspire enough confidence for me to use this tool.
The demo article only had a couple translations, so we auto-translated some missing ones. Sorry the Turkish one isn't great! Most of the app we try to encourage you to use professionally translated works to learn whichever language you're studying, so try to do as we say not as we do :D
As I’ve commented elsewhere, to the extent you are using machine translation: note that GPT is bad at translation to languages other than English. Telltale sign is not declining for gender. I saw this a lot with GPT4’s Polish. Better to use one of the standard translation services.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#25Two unrelated items: I had very good results many years ago polishing the last steps of my French while in France. My tutor used very novel and interesting short articles, one example was a short article about shrimp found in a cave with no light. At the time this was a novel bit of information and quite interesting on its own. I think an effort to find novel and educational information to learn from is an effort wel…
We will look into Albanian! We have some ideas on how to remove the language restrictions sometime this year.
When it comes to educational content, one of the things I'm most excited for is to have the stuff I'm learning hooked up into an SRS _and_ in another language. Not only will I remember things better because I'm learning it in another language, but I'll learn the other language better because I'm interested in the content.
Although I'm most interested in turning stories into language learning content. Instead of 'Jack was in the park in summer'', something like "John Snow stood on the wall in winter" I would expect to elad to much stronger memories.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#26Don't you worry that the ways of language acquisition that work for ultra-polyglots would necessarily work for regular people?
Why? Everyone acquires language the same way.
Their first one, maybe. But I've seen first-hand how much people vary in what they manage to learn from classes.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#27I look forward to giving user feedback when I’m able to signup.
> our Humane Spaced repeition system. Based off of the popular FSRS, our Spaced Repeition System will adapt to your review style. Take a few weeks off? No problem. Want to study ahead one day? No problem. Took a 2 year vacation? We're jealous, but we've got you covered.
I really resonate with this. I find that after a long break, I have forgotten a lot less than Anki’s algorithm believes.
Is there some reasonably scientific reference for this? I mean, I’d be interested to read someone’s study or theories here.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#28Congrats on the launch! As of now it feels like your target audience, or at least those that would understand what this might be, are people that probably have already spent a lot of time in language learning communities and understand some of what you're going for. For instance, I see "Shadowing" on one of the pages as a feature, which, if I wasn't aware of Alexander Arguelles' work, I'd have no idea what this was.…
Hey, thanks so much for the kind words!
Our target audience is definitely polyglots/advanced learners at the moment - mostly just due to time. We'll definitely get to the point where everything is explained - the only thing we're lacking atm is time :)
We've got some ideas to remove the limit on languages at some point this year. In the meantime I wonder if it's possible to use Hindi or Kannada TTS with Bengali. I'd be happy to work with you to try and get it working! It's very important for us to eventually support all languages.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#29Two unrelated items: I had very good results many years ago polishing the last steps of my French while in France. My tutor used very novel and interesting short articles, one example was a short article about shrimp found in a cave with no light. At the time this was a novel bit of information and quite interesting on its own. I think an effort to find novel and educational information to learn from is an effort wel…
We will look into Albanian! We have some ideas on how to remove the language restrictions sometime this year. When it comes to educational content, one of the things I'm most excited for is to have the stuff I'm learning hooked up into an SRS _and_ in another language. Not only will I remember things better because I'm learning it in another language, but I'll learn the other language better because I'm interested in…
> turning stories into language learning content
Great idea. It could be simple cloze deletion from the content pasted in, or are you thinking to use AI to create simplified expressions with similar semantics?
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#30I recognize this comment has little to do with this post, but as a fellow obscure language aficionado, I just wanted to recommend probably most obscure language I’m legitimately interested in called Modern Indo European. It’s a conlang that takes the reconstructed Proto Indo European and fills in the missing parts to turn it into a usable language.
That’s all, just wanted to give them a shoutout.
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I’m also an avid language learner myself, and I feel like what has worked for me has been to study a wide range of words with Anki, but then also try to use them in conversation. Often times I wouldn’t remember the words I studied, but it would be “on the tip of my tongue”. Then the speaker would fill in the word, and from then on I would never forget the word.
Finally, I think you guys are also headed in the right direction with the idea of “expression”, because I feel it is often difficult to map words 1 to 1 with a language you already know. Oftentimes the expression will be said differently “my name is” vs “to me the name is”. The idea is to capture a unit of meaning in a set expression and to be able to combine the expressions to communicate.