The page doesn't make a good job communicating what it offers. There's a lot of unimportant fluff, generic "we're the best", but I didn't really understand what the app offers beyond showing the same phrase in multiple languages.
Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
41–50 of 126 posts
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#42> The hardest part about learning a language is knowing what to learn. I disagree with this. The hardest part about learning a language is finding content and resources in the target language that are both engaging and comprehensible at your current level. It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient. The parts of the lan…
I'm not sure we entirely disagree.
The idea here is to load your RAM with enough information so you can go and interact with the language, and you have enough critical 'hooks' to start to boot up your GPU. Then once you've done that, you should have some good memories that you can start to commit to long term storage, should you choose
(did I go too far with the computer analogies? I feel like it broke down).
Either way, I think we say in several places, no app is going to replace the learning that happens from interacting with the content. _That's_ where you actually learn. Our sole purpose is to get you to be able to interact with it as fast as possible, with as little gymnastics as possible.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#43Could there be a naming conflict between your phrasing.app, and phrase.com, a translation management tool?
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#44I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks.
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律
Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; 子供たちが「自分はこの人たちとは違う。 自分はこの世界に向いていない」と思ったとしても彼らを責められまい。
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#45Hi! I would love to try this. I am currently on my 7th language so I am always excited to find language learning apps. So far none of them has beaten a good old language course and consuming media in the language. Maybe the website has received a bit too much love but I am trying to search for a TV show and the UI is not reacting at all (I entered "How I Met Your Mother" in the textbox below "How to do what you love"…
Hey! So the search box is part of a demo of an article we aligned. For the Playground, we just have some example content to show how it works (we wanted to share to HN but we didn't want to do so without giving people something to play with). We could have made that more clear.
In the actual application, you're correct, you just type in the show name and it will look it up for you. That's just not this page :)
With regards to the design, I think it's been dubbed 'Aurora UI'. We have a large figma files with dozens of similar sources, I think raycast is one of them haha
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#46I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks. With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律 Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as…
Honestly, I would not recommend it for Japanese/Chinese atm. We're aware the quality there is really not good. We'll have to spend a couple months dedicated to these languages specifically to clean them up.
Still, we don't want to stop our users from learning any language with it, even if it's not well supported. But I've been very transparent with any of our beta testers that Chinese/Japanese are not going to be a great experience (yet!)
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#47Given the prominent mentions of OpenAI I'm going to guess this doesn't use actual human translators but instead relies on machine translations using OpenAI?
This is literally what created a drastic decrease in the overall quality of Duolingo. I wouldn't trust an app like this if it's relying on machine translations, AI or not. Especially when it comes to learning phrases and real-world examples. Translation is hard. Machine translation is even harder. Machine translation for languages with limited sample sizes (e.g. "Sanskrit an Hawaiian") is nearly impossible.
The only way to make this thing pass an even remotely reasonable bar for quality would be to hire humans to train it but at the rates required to keep this thing profitable that borders on exploitation.
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#48Edit: nm
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#49French version looks wierd.
'"Toujours produire" découvrira le métier de ta vie...'
Huh? lol
Re: Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level
#50Two 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…
There will be two broad types of people: those with interest in fiction, and those who prefer non-fiction. The more you can offer something from each group, and from a few different genres / areas in those subgroups, the more people will be able to find their sweet spot.
For extra credit, analyze which subjects each person is learning the best from, and give them more of that. Eventually you should be able to find patterns and know when to switch things up by finding each person's learning cadences... romance, romance, chemistry, nature, romance, etc.
Out of curiosity I tried chatGPT with a simple: "please give me a list of ten interesting facts about the life of polar bears". It was ok. I got better results with: "can you rewrite that list, providing more unique, novel facts about polar bears? Things most people would not know?"