I hate browser plugins - but this needs to be a browser plugin. Then I would use it while reading HN. ;-)
I would suggest tackling dynamic difficulty and algorithmic selection of what words to learn, when, and how often, and then let improving LLMs handle accuracy improvements.
This looks nice and similar to toucan [1]. I have built something similar but a bit different for the web [2]. Happy, to share the code in a non-so-permissive license with you if you plan to build out web support.
Curious to hear the reasoning behind using the US flag for English, given there's a country called England.
It's the 3rd most populous country in the world, and it's filled with English speakers?
If those are the metrics we should be using the Indian flag.
The most import comment ^
It's just marketing guys, think of it as political pandering, more population, more patriotic population(emotional attachment), etc. I'm sure we all agree that America is more linguistically and geographically "challenged"(market potential) than the Brits yeah?.... sooo market where the market is. As for Brazil, that's a sheer population decision. They tried to shove Spain's version of spanish audio translation into the latin american portion of the new world (the thinking I guess was since america loves the british accent in movies... but it flopped.... now Hollywood/movie industry recruits voices from Mexico and other latam countries.
And you would prefer the English flag then - not the flag of the UK?
That's based on relevance.
Same goes for: Portuguese -> Brazil flag; Spanish -> Mexico flag; German -> Austria flag; Italian -> Switzerland flag
;)
If it's written in American English, wouldn't you rather know that from the start? I'd be more annoyed to have all the U's removed after my O's and still see a UK flag.
As far as I know English is different from English in many ways.
Colour Organisation Trousers
I don't know. Search online.
Thanks, I'll take a look!
Shout out for an app called Language Transfer that I just came across via Reddit (https://www.languagetransfer.org/). It teaches languages speaking first through a simple audio course. Developed by one guy, completely free and without ads.
From what I’ve seen so far has a very clear focus on quickly getting up to speed with a different angle than other courses. It talks about how to build vocabulary by looking at general patterns for shared vocabulary between languages.
Looks interesting and I'm going to try it out.
Curious about what differentiates it from something like pimsleur courses, other than price of course.
He starts out with shared vocabulary between English and the target language whereas I think Pimsleur focuses more on useful phrases for e.g. travel.
Yeah Pimsleur does tend to focus on travel scenarios.
Though I find it does a good job of actually getting phrases into your head and getting you thinking in the language.
Looking forward to trying out this approach.
This should work fantastic in theory, since differing vocabulary (not grammar) is the main factor that determines the difficulty of a new language. Putting off this primary obstacle so one can ease into it sounds genius to me. It also agrees with the method hyped by Steve Kaufman, where one should read and speak level-appropriate material.
That dude needs more money to support development, because his method is amazing. The other amazing method I love and used to learn Spanish was "Fluent Forever". Stick to the book there though, the author tried to grow his empire too big and the apps aren't that great in my opinion.
I used the Fluent Forever app to acquire about 1,000 Italian words in one year. Agree that it wouldn't win awards for polish (maybe Polish), but it fairly faithfully implements the method described in the book, which is roughly: make your own flash cards, using memorable imagery, from curated word lists designed for forming a wide range of sentences, and then study these using spaced repetition. You also get the ear training audio cues.
You can do it all yourself with Anki, indeed the author of the method started that way, but I am happy to not have had to pay the Anki usability tax.
Even if you don't use the app/method, the book (of the same title) is a quick and useful read about tricks used to optimize language acquisition.
Not to take a dig at you but to set some context for other language learners reading this, 1000 words in a year is awful progress. It would take you 10 years to be just semi-fluent in a simple (for native English speakers) language like Spanish, Italian, or French, and that's not including grammar. This is the main problem with feel-good apps like Duolingo, giving all sorts of positive feedback for what amounts to very little progress.
Anki + a frequency dictionary + 34 new words/day (with 80% retention due to spaced repetition) is easily doable by our brains to get to semi fluency (~10k words) in a year. Or, take a month to cram the first 2000 words and you're well on your way versus other wastes of time.
Just listened to the first couple tracks of the Complete Spanish course and it reminds me a lot of the Michel Thomas Method audio course [1], which I couldn't recommend highly enough.
Also found this app on forums and I wonder why it's not popular. It's amazing, simple and effective. And absolutely free
Love the idea; can I kindly ask if you're expanding to include German?
Hi, if it would be sufficient for you to read websites, I'm building https://vokabeln.io, though the concept is a bit different, focusing more on flashcards and spaced-repetition.
This looks great, I love the design! Especially your solution of "importing" known vocabulary by simply scrolling through word lists - very smart and intuitive!
Although it would be even better (for me) if one were able to import their Anki decks and have your app figure out the level of "competency" for each word. This is the biggest gripe I have with adopting a new language learning app: Having to re-learn vocabulary that I am already 100% confident in.
Also, I would love to be notified when the Spanish version comes around - is there any way for that?
seconded
Thirded
Thanks! At some point I may add it, but the difference in grammatical structure might limit how well it works. I'll try to start testing it soon.
I actually built 'Tembo - Bilingual Stories' while learning German myself, so hate to plug it on this thread, but we've got lots of German content, maybe you'll find something that interests you?
Is there a waiting list for Android? :)
From the site, there's a Play Store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glossarie....
This leads to a not found page, was the app taken down?
Works for me
Not working for me in Europe
hm, maybe region-restricted? I get a "not found"
I'd use this if it had a book I wanted to read. A while back, I tried Prismatext (https://prismatext.com/). It only offered old classics that had come out of copyright (ie, Project Gutenberg) and a handful of poorly-reviewed modern novels.
If you can license a modern book that someone would actually choose to read on their own, I'd pay for it. Bonus if I can sort/browse the available books by Goodreads (or similar) score. Prismatext makes it tedious to discover that readers didn't care for their modern books.
Thanks for the feedback. One of the features allows users to upload an epub to use in the app. Although I realise that a better method is needed, as it has become harder to find legitimate places to buy epub formatted books.
Do you require the epub to be drm stripped first?
The app doesn't do anything to remove DRM, so it'll only work with DRM-free files.
You're welcome for the feedback. I saw the epub import and thought it was novel, but as you said, I don't know of anywhere to buy modern fiction in epub. If you know of legal sellers and linked to them from the site, that would probably be enough for me as a customer.
That said, I'd gladly pay you/the site to handle that for me (by paying more than the book's retail price). Hopefully the translation would also be better than anything I imported.
(Two sibling replies linked to sites that sell technical non-fiction. That is a very hard way to learn :-) )
I've bought a few epubs (English only) from https://www.humblebundle.com/books and https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/books . I'm still skeptical of this proposition though: to learn a language by listening to a TTS? Better to go talk to people. The language starts to solidify after the sounds and non-verbal cues start matching up.
I have to admit I don't quite understand this.
Does it just replace words on a word-by-word basis? But the ordering of words in English is different from the ordering of words in other languages. How is this not going to teach you terrible grammar?
Looking at one of the screenshots, for instance, it translated "they had met their dead father" as "they had recontré leur mort father." But in French "mort" would come after "père."
And those differences that are not marked in English but are in French are the only hard part about learning it..
How is this not going to teach you terrible grammar?
Because it's not teaching grammar? It's teaching words. I already know English grammar: I already am going to have trouble with grammar conversion. But before I get there I need to learn a basic set of nouns and verbs.
Thanks for the feedback.
This is something that will improve over time - as it gets better at identifying longer phrases I can implement rules so it won't omit a neighbouring noun if the phrase contains a verb.
I understand your complaint, but I consider this a feature.
Learning vocabulary and learning grammar can be split apart.
I'd prefer it go the other way, to translate the current language's grammar into the other language's grammar. If you are learning Japanese, for example, having the English grammar match the grammar of Japanese would be a smoother learning experience (I think) than flipping grammar at the translation point.
But in any case, I would want the grammar to match if I am learning vocabulary. I don't want to have to guess, or presuppose the rules of the grammar.
Thanks for building and sharing this! As a feature request, which would likely be the decider for me using this, would you please consider an integration into koreader? As far as I know, koreader is the #1 open source app for ereaders. If anyone using their ereader can use this, you can expand your userbase outside of those who just read on mobile. I don't think I'm alone in never wanting to read an actual book with my phone. At any rate, best of luck and great work getting this shipped!
Never used koreader, does it have plugin support? If so something like this wouldn't be too complex to integrate.
It does have plugin support: https://koreader.rocks/user_guide/#plugins
I don't think I'm alone in never wanting to read an actual book with my phone
Although a koreader integration would be great, there are tablets with both Android and iOS, as well as eReaders with the former.
Not quite the same thing, but Vocabsieve (disclosure:my project) can read your KOReader lookup history to generate Anki cards with context and audio. I also feel like reading in your target language is a far better use of your time. Vocabulary is not the only thing you need to learn, you also need to internalize collocations and grammatical structures, which is best done through actual reading.
This looks really cool. I’d have loved to give it a try as someone interested in improving my French, but I wasn’t able to download the app since it’s pinned to the latest version of iOS only.
Are you using APIs that are unavailable on iOS 16 and under, or is it a matter of testing? My understanding was that about 25% of iPhone users aren’t on iOS 17 (myself included!) so it’s a fairly large demographic
I think it is SwiftData that meant I had to limit to iOS 17. I will double check because it might be a limitation I can solve easily enough.
Obviously, I do not know about this app, but as an iOS developer, my apps are pinned to iOS 17 as well. SwiftUI is way too infant to not have the latest features at your disposal, in fact, I'd describe it as 'unusable' before iOS 16.
+1, my device is unfortunately too old to upgrade to iOS 17 and I wouldn't imagine this app would use too many new features
This "new" idea I implemented for myself 15 years ago.
An idea generally becomes new to the world when it is published.
If you claim that you privately had the idea 15 years ago, it's possible; you just need credible, and credibly dated evidence.
I used it to teach myself Japanese. I would replace words in an English text with the Japanese translations, including kanji, furigana and English. I was working on a way to develop a curriculum of vocabulary. I prepared a couple of books this way and read them, then abandoned the approach. But it was pretty fun.
Looks great! I'd like to try it but the play store link has this error:
We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server.
A few people have raised this. I'll take a look. Unfortunately the App isn't available in all locations.
Got the same. Was about to sign up for a month to check it out
"I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve."
Some apps rely upon ongoing LLM API calls for their core functionality. Some require a lot of human editorial work up front. i.e. either high variable cost or high fixed cost economics.
This app lies in a sweet spot where no ongoing API calls are required, everything is pre-calculated (at moderate expense!), but LLMs can scale some of the more 'human' work like explaining translations or checking accuracy. Albeit with the quirks and inconsistencies inherent with the current generation of models.
I think they were differentiating themselves from their competitors by hinting that they put more work into this than just coming up with a UI and prompt for gpt4.
I'd love to see this on top of audible. Game changer for language learning!
Long term audio is something I'd look at, either audio books or podcasts. AR is another long term ambition.
Then can I shamelessly plug Tembo - Bilingual Stories (iOS/Android) to you. We offer audiobooks for some of our titles, so you can listen and learn simultaneously. It's a big undertaking to editing them all in-house, but we have audiobooks available for about 30 stories across our courses.
Bummer, it’s not available in my country.
Not in my App Store, too. I wonder why not release it worldwide?
Because I'm making public domain books available within the app (from Project Gutenburg), I have to limit the territories it is launched in, as some countries may have copyright limitations.
I will expand the app into more countries once I'm happy none of the books have copyright restrictions there. Feel free to message me with the country you reside in and I'll take a look soon.
I definitely don't want to learn another language by reading English. I've seen comments about people who learnt a language using Google translate from English, and they end up sounding like Google translate.
I prefer to learn by reading in the target language and translating to English as I go along.
Yeah I was gonna provide essentially the same feedback (so I'll just tack on here).
I definitely didn't see what I expected when opening a book for the first time -- I can already read or watch content in Italian. What I do today is pause (or stop reading) when I encounter a word I don't know.
What I expected when picking a level was definitely to see all Italian, though in retrospect I can imagine it's near impossible to do that without lots of paraphrasing.
But to me personally (much as I think this space needs more things, and that you OP are awesome for sharing it) that I'd not personally use something which wasn't entirely in my target language, as I find the way I've learned languages best so far to be similar to my current workflow, and over time I have to look up fewer and fewer words.
I agree - the dream would be to bridge from beginner level vocabulary all the way to a full translation in the target language.
The limitation now is getting consistently high accuracy for whole sentences - but something I'll keep working on as the underlying technologies improve.
What’s the planned business model? Neither the website nor the app page mention “free”. There is no pricing link or an FAQ page on the website about the business model. Clarity in this area would be helpful. Until then, I wouldn’t want to spend too much time on it. Thanks.
I second this! Obviously I wouldn't expect it to be free because of the different technologies (either current or planned) involved, but the lack of clarity in all the descriptions makes me doubt investing time/effort on it.
Right now I see this as an MVP to get feedback and see if there is interest. I have no plans to charge for any of the current features.
UX things.
Let me click anywhere to close the popup. Having to target a small button when reading means I have to stretch my thumb to reach it as it can be far from the word I clicked. Don’t make me have to think about the targeting. Eg when reading I never want to think about HOW to turn a page or where I need to swipe.
Make the scroll bar stay visible or at least make it big enough to easily grab!
Not sure why the reflow is causing a horizontal scroll.
Can you retain chapters from the original epub?
Text size options.
Hide the bottom logo and percentage when reading if I want.
Its possible to convert html to epub but it would be better if you handled web pages natively.
This is a really great language app!
Thanks for the feedback, very helpful!
I'll look to fix the first tomorrow, and add the rest to my list.
Can you clarify what the “upload” ability does? Is it putting my epub on your server? Does it remain there?
It gets automatically deleted after 24 hours.
It only works with iOS 17.0+
Could you make it work with any versions lower than 17.0?
I'll take a look. I think there were a couple of features that required 17.0+, but I may be able to solve with an earlier version.
The LLM based explanations were the key thing about this app for me. It’s hard for me to fit foreign vocabularies into context for long-term recall without etymologies and comparisons to common roots in Latin, and I’ve already had several ah-ha moments due to those explanations. Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback!
Whilst there are some, often amusing, quirks with the LLM based explanations, I agree that the utility of the app is much higher with them.
I’ve been wanting to get back my faded ability to read French after having neglected this skill for far too long. This is a pleasant way to ease me into this, I am loving this app!
Thanks!
Why the developer doesn’t make this app available in all regions beats me. If you’re reading this, please do so so I can download it.
I'll look to make it available in more regions soon. I just need to check the copyright limitations for the eBooks made available in the app.
Which languages do you support ?
English eBooks, with French, Italian and Spanish as the target languages to learn. I will also start looking at integrating German.
This such an awesome and unique new way to learn a language. I use both Pimsleurs and DuoLingo but it's always kind of a chore. Will definitely give this a shot. Really refreshing take on learning too, everyone basically has variants of flash cards which gets tedious. And it's free! Thank you!
It's definitely a cool project, but this same concept has been around quite a while. Many chrome extensions do this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readlang-web-reade...
If OPs project is using LLMs, it could definitely be much higher quality when it's swapping out more than a few words.
This reminds me of Linugua Latina Per Se Illustrata (Latin language illustrated by itself), which is a latin self-learning book written fully in Latin. It's structured in such a way that you naturally learn new words and grammar as you progress just by reading it. I suggest everyone check it out even if you don't care about learning latin, simply because it's one of the most fun ways to learn a language I've seen
Love this book.
I tried that app and it looks good. It was a bit hard for me to decide what book to choose. Question: do users later get quizzed on the words they looked up?
Not currently, but it's definitely something I want to add soon.
Thank you for the effort.
I tried the practice a bit, and the explanations (generated by ai I guess?) were very nice. I met a bit of an unfair situation in one question. The sentence started with "They" and the options were Ils and Elles. However, the sentence in English didn't hint towards a gender, and I failed the 1d2 and got what felt like a sarcastic explanation.
Thanks for the feedback! Admittedly the practice feature needs a bit more work. Helpful to know the issues you are experiencing.
This is super cool, thank you for building it! Two small UX ideas:
- a scrollbar and search for the Online Library would be helpful
- switching difficulty levels in the middle of reading could be helpful. Or if you keep that on a separate page, returning automatically to the last open position. (I was floating between beginner levels to find the right amount of challenge)
Thanks for the feedback! I'll look at adding those.
Sounds great. Any plans for a visionOS app? I think this would be the perfect use case for it.
Something I'd love to look at longer-term. I think an overlay onto the real world that slowly immersed you in a new language would be a really powerful way to learn.
Oh great timing! I was just starting to play with building a toy project (https://github.com/bpevs/multireader) for practicing Spanish while reading books with my e-reader, but frankly, I'm just building it because I haven't found an app that works for me, and I'd rather spend time actually actually learning language...
Just playing with your app for a bit, and it's pretty cool! had a few questions though:
1. Wondering about the decision of using English books and translating pieces into other languages vs starting with (for example) a Spanish book, and translating the other way? Also, would something like this be a future thought of plan? Because currently I'm trying to read more popular books in my target language, rather than English books (right now, my toy app is just highlight arbitrary text -> send to azure translate). I tried to upload my book into your app in Spanish, but I guess it only works rn if the source is in English? Basically, a mode for even more immersion would be killer (Ala either full-target-languge mode or upload target language books).
2. The practice mode is pretty cool! I like this format of "complete the sentence". It looks like it's not based on book content at all, right? Would be cool to practice based on what I'm reading.
3. I'm reading on an e-reader, so I'd reeeeally like a no-animation/no-scroll mode. On an e-reader, the paginated page refreshing can help to reduce ghosting. Even better if there could be an e-reader mode that can flash the screen to further reduce ghosting issues on those devices.
Thanks for the feedback!
1. I would love to get it to work all the way from a few translations in the target language to a full translation, with a sliding scale in between. 2. It's not connected to the book content. One idea I have is an optional quiz at the end of a session to reinforce new vocabulary/grammar seen. 3. I'll see if I can remove the animation when using the page ahead/back buttons on Android.
This is a beautiful idea and easy app to use, thanks for the work!
Thank you!
Not interested if it uses AI.
Nice! I made a very similar app, but with podcasts and Youtube channels instead of books. https://www.langturbo.com
Neat! I had a very similar idea recently: https://seamlang.app/ (the sign up button doesn't work yet)
The main difference seems to be that I start with text in the foreign language, and then translate the difficult vocabulary back to the known language (English). That way you always ensure you have the correct grammar of your goal language even if you don't know most of the vocabulary yet. This can be a bit confusing at first because you have mostly English text with Spanish word order, but just trying it a bit it works pretty well. It also makes the difficulty an easier problem because the grammer stays the same.
I haven't gotten around to finishing it yet, especially judging which vocabulary to translate and ensuring each translated word still makes sense in context isn't easy.
This looks really cool! Too bad you don’t have Korean though. But I’m already a LingQ user, how is Glossarie different?
Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books.
Shameless plug: I’ve identified the same problem and built an app that shows a new word every minute on the Menu Bar so I can learn a new word while working: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wunderbar-learn-language/id647...
Rather, with this, you can learn to speak English like a Frenchman.
For any English word that came from French, use the French cognate, and pronounce it in the French way. Or at least the latter.
How would you deal with things like Japanese and English, where the source and target languages are awfully apart?
French, Italian and Spanish all share the same root and English borrows a lot of words from the three of them (plus the alphabet and the indo-european origin).
Many thanks for all of the positive feedback today, lots of good ideas for me to get working on; what a great community!
Side-note: A few eBooks are causing errors on the backend that don't appear to be DRM-related. I will prioritise getting this fixed.
Would be nice to have an option to send an epub to Kindle.
I could say that its interesting, but its instead region restricted (for android at least) and now available in Europe.
In case it's useful to anyone: another implementation of this idea is Weeve https://shop.weeve.ie I bought one of their books (a study in scarlet) but it wasn't great. Lots of mistranslation, especially later on in the book. The general idea seemed to work well though, with better implementation I think it could really help my french.
I'll give this one a try, being able to add my own books is particularly exciting.
I'd love to try this out, but I'm unsure how it would work with a language that has such different grammar from English. Would it just be vocabulary then? Or would it just be entire sentences in the language to accommodate for the grammar, and then would it switch to English?
Tagalog (a language from the Philippines) has many sentences that are the opposite order than in English.
For example, in English you'd say "The house is beautiful", but in Tagalog you'd say "Maganda ang bahay" which translates to "Beautiful the house" [0]. There's another free grammar book for Tagalog as well [1].
[0]: https://unilang.org/course.php?res=79#ci--l2 [1]: https://learningtagalog.com/grammar/
Wasn’t this idea an ACX post? I am absolutely sure Scott wrote that someone should create this.
cant find it on my iphone appstore
Portugals Portuguese please (no Brazil, almost all the apps that teach Portuguese, teach the Brazil version, which makes you sound like a joke here; thanks Duolingo!).
Can you add one Russian book with translations into Spanish? I wanna give it a try. Maybe a couple of chapters would work. This book is my favourite since I was a kid: "magician in town yuri tomin" (Russian: "шёл по городу волшебник юрий томин").
This would be super cool as a browser extention. Turn news articles or hacker news into a language learning tool.
Google Play button on the site leads to a 404.
When will you have Farsi, Japanese & Mandarin?
No Chinese.
We had this on HN: https://github.com/simjanos-dev/LinguaCafe
https://jointoucan.com/ - hope you enjoy it
Just tried Toucan and it can't be disabled on localhost, a major pain for using it during work as an engineer. For those that haven't used toucan, it's an extension that translates words/phrases inline on a page with various levels of replacement frequency and complexity based on your proficiency with the language.
This [1] help article says that it's free. Not sure how much we should trust that though. Did you find a better source?
[1] https://support.babbel.com/hc/en-gb/articles/13752043233170-...
Not available on Firefox.
Bummer. I was about to give it a try
I wasted 10 minutes trying to find the pricing page. There’s no way I’m going to use an app that deliberately hides the pricing information.
Nice idea - although I hate having to start from scratch and having to "train" the system to know my level and vocabulary. I think it's a bummer that it's not common to be be able to exchange vocabulary lists between apps.
That would be amazing, not everyone reads eBooks (whether because they don't read books, or just prefer physical) but everyone whose a potential user anyway does browse websites.
Also because while I absolutely love the idea for seamless Hinglish style integration (as opposed to say a side bar which just told you what some words would be in a different language) it does mean that I'm no longer really reading the book, I'm reading the content but not the author. I don't personally read anything that I'd want to alter like that, but I can imagine for others it might limit its use to 'trashy novella read while travelling' or something.
Tldr the idea is brilliant, but for me too it needs to not be for eBooks.
Who's* (can't edit)
Show HN: Rusty eel-gathering hovercraft
Definitely an idea on the roadmap. I know most people do most of their reading in a browser and not eBooks.
I'll see how easy it is. I get palpitations thinking about developing on another new platform. Java and Swift were a challenge enough to learn!
AFAIK, I think the most popular version of this idea is https://readlang.com