Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ereader Easy Swedish

ereader-swedish.fly.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#51

Post by jamesblonde »

vidarh wrote: post #24
Phenomenit wrote: post #14

Is there something similar in French? Preferably from French/English to simplified French?

But English is simplified French ;) With apologies to Dumas ("L’anglais n’est que du français mal prononcé" - "English is little more than badly pronounced French" - spoken by D'Artagnan in Twenty Years After) The "quick and dirty" solution would be to cut and paste into Claude or ChatGPT, probably in sections to prevent it from going too far off piste/forget what it's meant to be doing, with a suitable prompt.

n’est que du -> is only

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#52

Post by zersiax »

pivic wrote: post #41

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first paragraph in English: > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in…

You're not wrong but I think there is absolutely a case to be made for these kinds of restructurings as well. For one, giving you the restructured version exposes you to different ways of stating the same content, it might make reading longform content (without falling back to the original source material too often) more fluid, and more situationally, this kind of simplification and restructuring actually happens really often in subtitling, where character count is more leading than the lip movements a dub is based on. e.g. you'll hear one thing, but the sub is that same content often radically redone :)

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#53

Post by fifilura »

triyambakam wrote: post #15

I also learned Swedish, which I think is very interesting, because Sweden has 1/4 the population of California, but has a relatively large influence on Western culture. At least in my mind. Regarding learning a language, I recommend looking into Dr Krashen's theory of language acquisition, specifically comprehensible input. His favorite resource is comic books. For Swedish, I really like SVT with a VPN.

A method I love, because it is actually a pleasure, is to find music you like in the language.

I love listening to the same songs over and over again anyway, and once in a while I get curious what they are actually saying in a new sentence.

I do this for learning German once in a while, but I am sure it would work fine for Swedish as well.

Markus Krunegård is my favourite right now, and I think he sings with a clear language.

But there are lots of (pop) music in Swedish with interesting lyrics; Veronica Maggio, Little Jinder, Håkan Hellström, Miss Li, Kent. A very random sample from a much much longer list obviously.

And a passive method, so, while it is pure joy, it needs to be complemented with actul studying of course.

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#54

Post by BurningFrog »

ftrobro wrote: post #48
pivic wrote: post #41

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first paragraph in English: > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in…

Is "ateljé" (meaning art studio) really the correct Swedish translation here? I suspect "etta" (meaning one-room apartment) would be more suitable.

Yeah, 99% sure it's an apartment in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_apartment

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#55

Post by tapland »

pivic wrote: post #41

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first paragraph in English: > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in…

My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies, but really feels the need to consume more swedish text.

The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice.

This looks promising for their situation. I'll plop LoTR, Antimemetics Division or something in there later and see how it turns out!

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#56

Post by dehrmann »

tapland wrote: post #55
pivic wrote: post #41

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first paragraph in English: > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in…

My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies, but really feels the need to consume more swedish text. The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice. This looks…

The problem with learning Swedish is 95% of Swedes speak English and are more than happy to speak English.

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#57

Post by barbazoo »

Love that it's open source. Here's the magic sauce, i.e. system prompt:

> I want to translate this part of a book text to swedish. Translate to EASY swedish. Make the sentence structure easy. Make the words easy. Simplify it to A1 level while maintaining the story meaning. output ONLY the translation. Use the previous text and after text to understand the context. previous text: "{previous_text}" after text: "{after_text}" text to translate: $BEGIN_TEXT${original_chunk}$END_TEXT$ " DO NOT SKIP ANY TEXT INSIDE $BEGIN_TEXT$ and $END_TEXT$

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#58

Post by amarant »

dehrmann wrote: post #56
tapland wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies, but really feels the need to consume more swedish text. The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice. This looks…

The problem with learning Swedish is 95% of Swedes speak English and are more than happy to speak English.

And will switch to English as soon as we detect the slightest hint of a foreign accent, in a often misguided attempt to be helpful.

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#59

Post by stevesimmons »

tapland wrote: post #55
pivic wrote: post #41

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first paragraph in English: > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in…

My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies, but really feels the need to consume more swedish text. The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice. This looks…

When I was learning Dutch, I found the same gap between kids' books that were too simple and proper novels that were too complex.

Newspapers were the easiest and best way to bridge that. They made it easy to pick a story where you had both some interest and enough background context.

I started with De Telegraaf, a popular newspaper, with short, simple stories and lots of photos. And over the course of 18 months worked my way up to serious papers like NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant.

So I'd give newspapers (and magazines) a go.

Back then, I'd sit in a cafe with my dictionary, reading their newspapers, and handwriting lists of words to learn. Nowadays it would be reading the paper's website on my laptop, pasting paragraphs into GPT, and adding the words to Anki etc :)

Re: Ereader Easy Swedish

#60

Post by cycomanic »

amarant wrote: post #58
dehrmann wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with learning Swedish is 95% of Swedes speak English and are more than happy to speak English.

And will switch to English as soon as we detect the slightest hint of a foreign accent, in a often misguided attempt to be helpful.

Except when asked if they speak English, where they then very hesitantly say (in perfect English btw) "a little bit".

Quite interesting cultural differences btw. In my experience, if you ask the same question in Denmark, the answer is "of course... Everybody here speaks English"

Post reply on HN