Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:02 PM UTC

arafalov wrote: post #50

MattKelly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flowlingo dev here. Thanks for the feedback! It's been a while since I've taken French, but one thing we plan on adding is translations of individual words in-context. For example, in Spanish, if you tapped an individual verb, the translation would be properly conjugated in relation to the sentence. We'd love to hear your other feedback, feel free to chat with us in the app (tap "Help" and scroll to the bottom), or e…

I think you would find it difficult to conjugate _the translation_ as the conjugation tables/rules differ between the languages and the mapping is not one of one. For example, English only has 'you' but French has both singular and plural forms. Russian has the declension as well (Именительный, Родительный...) I think it would make more sense to normalize at the _source_ language as I wrote originally. See also the o…

Pedant: English has y'all and 'all yall', both plural forms of 'you'.

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#52

Post by arafalov » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51

arafalov wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would find it difficult to conjugate _the translation_ as the conjugation tables/rules differ between the languages and the mapping is not one of one. For example, English only has 'you' but French has both singular and plural forms. Russian has the declension as well (Именительный, Родительный...) I think it would make more sense to normalize at the _source_ language as I wrote originally. See also the o…

Pedant: English has y'all and 'all yall', both plural forms of 'you'.

Well, the pedantry can goo all the way down too!

These two forms are a dialect (variation?) of English, mostly used in Southern USA.

Also, if I remember my John McWhorter correctly: 1) "y'all" refers to a group majority (e.g. a group of 10 people within the global collective of 20) 2) "all y'all" refers to the complete set (all 20)

Both of these are contextually narrow than "you" which can refer to a single person or to an undefined sized group.

A possibly better example would have actually been "thou", an archaic singular 2nd person pronoun.

However, all of this is just further proof that the equivalence in conjugation is a harder problem that could be imagined. So, thank you for contributing a good example.

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#53

Post by samuraiseoul » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

MattKelly wrote: post #42

samuraiseoul wrote: post #33

Phone only and also requires sign up before I can even see a list of languages that are available? I'd like to use it but I'm not gonna do it on my phone, and I'm not gonna sign up before if I know my target languages are available. Also its not clear if this is just some in-line translation of articles and subtitles using google translate? Something else?

We list the languages on the website and the app description (also rakoo pasted them in his comment). Check out @levpopov's other comments about phone #s ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097197 ) and how we handle translation ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097026 ).

I see the language description on the site now but it was hard to spot until I looked really carefully. That said, I don't see a way to use this as a web app, only to download it for a mobile device. I know the phone number is for getting a download link but the thing is I do not want to download it.

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#54

Post by amaccuish » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #47

avinium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that annoys me about all of these attempts is failing to recognize the impact of irregular forms of the verbs. So - for French - all the different forms of the verb aller (go) are treated individually. I paid for ReadLang for a while, but this lack of a feature has proven too frustrating. I don't speak French so I'm having trouble understanding what you mean. Do you mind giving a bit more detail? I'm also c…

French here, I never realized it but there are at least 3 different forms depending on who does it and when: Present: Je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont Future: j'irai, tu iras, il ira, nous irons, vous irez, ils iront Same goes for être (to be): Present: Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont Future: Je serai, tu sera, il sera, nous serons, vous serez, ils seront Simple past:…

The subordinate is actually the present subjunctive. There's also a past subjunctive (que je fusse, tu fusses, il fût, nous fussions, vous fussiez, ils fussent) and other forms with auxliaries, if I remember my grammar properly, the formsare derived from the simple past, or the other way around, can't remember.

The reason it's not subordinate is because I think there are some very rare cases where it can be used without a que, but I can't think over one off the top of my head.

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#55

Post by amaccuish » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

MattKelly wrote: post #41

arafalov wrote: post #39

The thing that annoys me about all of these attempts is failing to recognize the impact of irregular forms of the verbs. So - for French - all the different forms of the verb aller (go) are treated individually. I paid for ReadLang for a while, but this lack of a feature has proven too frustrating. I would have loved to have an app that runs the text through something like Google Natural Language API ( https://cloud.…

Flowlingo dev here. Thanks for the feedback! It's been a while since I've taken French, but one thing we plan on adding is translations of individual words in-context. For example, in Spanish, if you tapped an individual verb, the translation would be properly conjugated in relation to the sentence. We'd love to hear your other feedback, feel free to chat with us in the app (tap "Help" and scroll to the bottom), or e…

I think both could be useful. If I'm reading something in russian, for example, иду, that on its own isn't very interesting to me, I want to be able to see the whole verb, especially when there are stem changes etc.

Re: Show HN: Flowlingo – practice a foreign language with tech news

#56

Post by ramblerman » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:10 AM UTC

samuraiseoul wrote: post #53

MattKelly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We list the languages on the website and the app description (also rakoo pasted them in his comment). Check out @levpopov's other comments about phone #s ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097197 ) and how we handle translation ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097026 ).

I see the language description on the site now but it was hard to spot until I looked really carefully. That said, I don't see a way to use this as a web app, only to download it for a mobile device. I know the phone number is for getting a download link but the thing is I do not want to download it.

Then don’t.