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Building an app to learn languages with short stories
purplehoisin.com
Might be worth a pass through to proof-read; I saw another couple of typos, but the page is now throwing a Wordpress database error, so that might be more urgent to look at.
> You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation.
This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too.
That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any text really. (you can use calibre to convert into and between most ebook formats)
I look forward to seeing where this goes! I imagine the really difficulty will be applying it to more than just German. Especially when you branch outside of indoeuropean languages
I'm learning Japanese and something like this would be beneficial. > You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation. This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too. That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any tex…
Beyond Kindle capabilities, it also tracks the words, kanji, sentences you read to show you analytics based on that, chart your progress against JLPT levels simply by reading, and uses that data (all in your own iCloud/device storage) to coordinate flashcard review. I recently added early Anki integration. Still working hard on it, bringing more languages soon and cross-plat via SwiftWASM a bit later.
LingQ's killer feature for me is that as you click on words (or phrases - which I find really helpful btw) to translate them, they are added to your vocabulary list. It will automatically create flashcards for you from this list for SRS. Plus when you're reading a new story, words that are in your vocab list are highlighted yellow and new words are highlighted blue.
I'd be happy to pay for such a service if the stories were written by a human, but once I learned the stories are AI generated, I bounced. Even if they're edited by a native speaker, something about that feels off. I want to learn from other humans, not from a language model.
"learn from an LLM who learned from other humans"
I feel like ChatGPT plus voice input (speech to text) plus voice output at different playback speeds (text to speech) would be a fine way to learn some English.
Maybe it shouldn't be the only method one uses, but I think it is a useful method.
So why not for other languages?
I'd love to use a Japanese LLM with voice capability. It could even write stories for me that I could read and listen to.