Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#2I thought that this would look for unique words rather than just cycle through all words. You should have a default ignore word list that includes things like el, en, de, etc etc.
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#3I thought that this would look for unique words rather than just cycle through all words. You should have a default ignore word list that includes things like el, en, de, etc etc.
> I thought that this would look for unique words rather than just cycle through all words
It appears to be cycling through all unique words.
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#4The one-at-a-time UX is too slow I think. I'd rather see N words at a time and select the ones I don't know.
I'm also not sure how to use this tool in a learning workflow since you have to be able to copy and paste a bunch of text. I guess the use-case is when you're reading articles online on a desktop device, but as you read the article you can already pinpoint the words that you don't know, yet this tool makes you paste the text back into the tool and reconsume all the words again.
A better version of this tool might be a browser plugin that lets you click words as you read content online and add to a vocab list. This way as you practice reading social media or news in Spanish online, you can accumulate words and then do something with them. Maybe export Anki cards or whatever it was that you had planned.
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#5The one-at-a-time UX is too slow I think. I'd rather see N words at a time and select the ones I don't know. I'm also not sure how to use this tool in a learning workflow since you have to be able to copy and paste a bunch of text. I guess the use-case is when you're reading articles online on a desktop device, but as you read the article you can already pinpoint the words that you don't know, yet this tool makes you…
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to https://www.languagereactor.com/ and it's great so far. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#6The one-at-a-time UX is too slow I think. I'd rather see N words at a time and select the ones I don't know. I'm also not sure how to use this tool in a learning workflow since you have to be able to copy and paste a bunch of text. I guess the use-case is when you're reading articles online on a desktop device, but as you read the article you can already pinpoint the words that you don't know, yet this tool makes you…
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to https://www.languagereactor.com/ and it's great so far. Thanks!
Heh that's mine and Ognjen's project. :)
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to https://www.languagereactor.com/ and it's great so far. Thanks!
Heh that's mine and Ognjen's project. :)
Well, thank you very much, because I'm really enjoying it. So far I've only tried Netflix and PhrasePump, but both are very helpful.
I'm honestly surprised by how well the Netflix integration works. I have a good friend from China who has more or less perfect English now, and I once asked him how he first become proficient and he said that he really got going by watching every episode of "Friends". I feel like LanguageReactor's Netflix tools are the same idea but on steroids!
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#8I clicked "let's mine" without inputting anything and the app shows "-1 words remaining"
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#9The one-at-a-time UX is too slow I think. I'd rather see N words at a time and select the ones I don't know. I'm also not sure how to use this tool in a learning workflow since you have to be able to copy and paste a bunch of text. I guess the use-case is when you're reading articles online on a desktop device, but as you read the article you can already pinpoint the words that you don't know, yet this tool makes you…
Huh, I literally built an app that does what you describe! Basically an e-reader for language learners called Polyreader. It's a stand-alone app, not a browser plugin, but it has lots of additional features like in-line translation. Maybe I should finally open-source it!
Re: Show HN: Vocab Miner – find new words in Spanish from texts
#10One suggestion for reducing the burden on your users would be to start making predictions about what vocabulary your user already knows, just based on what's known about word frequency and a short quiz pulled from the text.
I copied in a long poem and it looked like I was going to be prompted about whether I knew 1500+ "words" (are you lemmatizing the input at all, BTW?). If your user knows the most common verbs, they probably already know the prepositions, pronouns, and other closed lexical classes of words (and vice versa). If your user is familiar with less common vocabulary (e.g. something at C1), raise the word frequency threshold for checking if the user is familiar with the word. If your user is less familiar with basic vocabulary, don't overwhelm them with moderate and advanced vocabulary.
That would make the prompting portion more interesting -- you select the most discriminating words to zero in on estimating the user's ability (this is really how adaptive testing works). You could gamify this too, by essentially establishing the user's "vocab ELO" rating based on word frequency.
Admittedly, maybe my suggestion misses the point of your app in case the objective was to be sure that you don't miss any new-to-you vocab in a text. On the other hand, if you could do something along the lines of my suggesting, you won't overwhelm beginners and you won't exasperate more advanced learners.