
Language Learning for the Dispassionate - wkrause
https://langliter.com/blog/longterm_challenges/
======
peterburkimsher
Do you want content for Chinese? I have a lot of data I've gathered for use
with [http://pingtype.github.io](http://pingtype.github.io) that I'd be
willing to share (and I admit that your web design is better than mine).

Learning Chinese has a lot more initial barriers, which I explain more in this
blog post:

[https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html](https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html)

~~~
wkrause
Eventually yes, my vision for the app is to effectively use NLP to solve some
common challenges readers have when learning a language. I'd like it to be
more than a news reader with a flashcard system.

So to do that properly, I would need to learn a bit more about Chinese to
understand how it would fit. Your docs do a good job explaining the problems
you're solving, but since I lack even a cursory understanding of the Chinese
writing system, I have a hard time following it all.

Impressive app btw, I clicked the "Advanced" button and can see there's a lot
of functionality there.

------
ff_
Looks like OP is the author behind the app, so I would suggest adding a "Show
HN" to the title, for more kudos and feedback.

That said, congrats for the good work! I really like the idea, and I feel this
problem very much. Currently picking up Swedish, and unable to find easy
enough news worth reading every day, so I'm a bit stuck at that level "able to
understand a bit but not enough to read everything".

Do you happen to have a roadmap about the addition of new languages? If
Swedish was there I would totally go Pro.

~~~
philangist
Jag är också tränar hur man pratar lite svenska.

What resources have you been using? Klartext is a service that delivers news
in accessible Swedish (sort of like simple English Wikipedia) along with
pronounciations that I’ve found to be very useful - sverigesradio.se/klartext

I’ve also changed my phone’s native language to Swedish and I’ve been watching
English Netflix shows with subtitles which has really helped with picking up
new words. I’m also using the SVT Play app to watch Swedish language programs
with Swedish subtitles to develop oral comprehension and improve
pronunciation.

There’s probably no substitute for total immersion but since I don’t plan on
moving to Sweden anytime soon I’ve found the above resources to be helpful.

------
kaycebasques
Looks cool, thanks for sharing.

Duolingo Spanish has a new "Stories" section that quizzes you in the context
of a story.

[https://stories.duolingo.com/](https://stories.duolingo.com/)

I'm also digging their new Podcast, which tells stories, NPR-style,
alternating between Spanish and English.

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tzs
Nit pick: shouldn't marginal utility be the first derivative of total utility?
That bend in the marginal utility near "ventriloquist" looks wrong to me given
the total utility shown.

~~~
wkrause
Ha ha, yeah you caught me. I was fighting with the Vector tool in Sketch. My
old econ professors would be disappointed.

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Treegarden
I have been working on something very similar for the past year.

I first build this prototype with the goal of generating sentences and then
analysing the user translation because I wanted a feature to see if the user
knows the word even though he misspelled it.

[http://ling-academy.com/](http://ling-academy.com/)

I finished that 3 months ago, received feedback but its just a proof of
concept and since then have been building v2 which is very similar to what you
have build - the idea is to have users learn vocab and then match them up with
fitting text. This v2 is almost done but not deployed yet.

I do however plan on going much much further then this. I have been looking
for a co-founder who is also invested into e-learning and language learning.
Maybe we should team up? Email is:

Michael . baumgarn at gmail . com

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IIAOPSW
Thank you so much for this. I'm an unabashed linguistic philistine. I see
language at best as a useful tool and find no more beauty in it than I do in a
hammer. But I'm also a long term expat and I feel kind of rude barging into
these countries, taking the jobs and the women and not adapting the culture at
all. This is exactly what I need.

Before now I've half-heartedly tried to write a script that would give flash
cards based on a combination of word frequency in common texts and the amount
of times I've gotten the word correct in the past. It didn't work. I should
try your app.

~~~
wkrause
Funny you should mention that, in about a week I'm planning to make public a
frequency list collected from a corpus of over 40k Spanish news articles (I've
been working on Langliter for a long time). Since I'm finding the lemma of
every word in the corpus and I'm tagging each word with its PoS, it's actually
a really valuable list. I plan to update the list quarterly as my corpus
grows.

I'm currently only using it to calculate a modified version of the Dale Chall
readability score. Figured people could make good use of it and it would be a
good way to drive people the the site.

~~~
pugio
That would be absolutely amazing. I can't wait for the German addition to the
site (current learning project).

How much hand tuning does this process require? If you had a corpus of German
news articles, for instance, could you just run the software and receive a
sorted frequency list?

~~~
wkrause
Just letting you know that I've uploaded the first frequency list. Just
Spanish at the moment, but will be adding more over time.

[https://langliter.com/blog/frequency_lists/](https://langliter.com/blog/frequency_lists/)

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badtuple
Can you go into any detail around how you curate the Portuguese content? The
icon has both the Brazilian and Portuguese flag. One thing I've had difficulty
with is that there's just enough differences between the two that mixing them
can be confusing while learning. Lack of European Portuguese is why I
basically dropped Duolingo and settled on just reading books/listening to
music. The dialects are super similar to those who already know the language,
but when even basic nouns differ it can get hard!

Just downloaded the app and it's awesome. Thanks for making it!

~~~
wkrause
Glad you like it so far, and that's valuable feedback regarding Portuguese as
it's not a language I'm personally studying.

I'm leveraging RSS feeds from popular papers in the languages I'm supporting
with some weights applied so no single source is overly dominate in the feed.
That said, I need to add more Portuguese and French sources, which is
something I'm planning to take on this weekend. Right now the only paper from
Portugal I've included is Correio da Manhã. If you have a favorite paper, let
me know and I'll look to add it.

In terms of control, you can filter by country of origin. Please let me know
if you think that is sufficient to address your concerns or if there is more I
should be doing to separate the European and Brazilian Portuguese.

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joshlemer
Thanks for this! It's nice to see more tools out there for advanced language
learners because, like the article states, it sure is a long slog isn't it. I
especially am happy to see that this app adds the Lemma
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_\(morphology\))
of the new vocabulary to the spaced-repetition flashcards rather than the
particular form it appears in on the page. That has taken up a lot of my time
with other similar apps.

~~~
wkrause
Thanks, the lemma issue is literally the reason I started building Langliter.

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norrius
The idea sounds great, but the app description definitely should have
mentioned what languages are available. I spent five minutes fighting with the
faulty OAuth only to find that German is not offered.

~~~
wkrause
Sorry about that, I really should keep an updated list of supported languages
with the call to action download at the bottom of the article. Thank you for
bringing this to my attention.

I'm looking to support German the first half of this year. It's currently
number 2 or 3 on my new language priority list. If you'd like to get an email
when it's available, there is a form at the bottom of the homepage that let's
you fill out what language pairs you're interested in.

~~~
zuzuleinen
I would make that form a bit more visible. If I wouldn't have read this
comment I would have left the website and didn't come back.

Looks like a great app; while I'm learning german I will definitely sign up
when it becomes available.

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xingped
Any plans to support Asian languages?

~~~
wkrause13
The short answer is no, because I don't know enough about those languages to
deliver a valuable experience.

I think the value from Langliter comes from two areas:

1\. The NLP processing and tooling built on top of that processing 2\. Its
superior mobile experience

If I just used a simple form of tokenization, I think I could very quickly
deliver a superior mobile experience than what is currently available from
similar apps. However, I'm not sure if PoS tagging and some of the other
techniques I'm using translate to those languages or if they do, how much
value they'd add to the learning process.

But it's something I'll certainly revisit if the app ends up being popular and
I have the resources to do it properly.

~~~
meric
Awesome work! I am learning a language and have been fantasising about a tool
like this.

What about support of non-latin alphabet languages? I'm learning Dari at the
moment. It uses Arabic alphabets, the words are a string of alphabets, there
is tenses, verbs, nouns, adjectives. It's different to English only by the
alphabet used, the vocabulary and the ordering of the verbs/nouns/subject.

Is it possible for it to be opened up to third parties to contribute new
languages?

~~~
wkrause
It's definitely something I hope to get to explore. Langliter is only a side
project at the moment, so I'm focusing on languages that I have a little
experience with. But as long as the licensing is compatible, I've built
Langliter to be pretty flexible in terms of the types of tags it could
support.

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melling
For those interested in languages, I’ve got an iOS Word Search game that
allows you to play in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-
search/id1311744...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-
search/id1311744075?mt=8)

I noticed that there is some interest in Russian here. I can add that in the
future. There wasn’t enough room on the controller so I left it out.

------
t3h2mas
I hope that language education services don't forget the desktop experience.
As someone who spends 8h a day online, I have times where I go home and don't
want to look at a screen.

I want a good desktop experience. I'd love something that would ping me every
few hours to make me exercise my language practice.

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adrianN
The Internet + Yomichan + Anki integration is basically this for Japanese. You
read real texts, Yomichan helps with missing words and with one click you can
add them (with context) to Anki.

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nategri
Add support for Russian and I'm in. This looks like exactly the language app
I've been dreaming of--real language-native content with quick lookups for
stuff you don't know.

~~~
wkrause13
Glad you like the concept! Russian is currently language #4 on my list, and I
hope to add it in the first half of this year. There's a form at the bottom of
Langliter's homepage that lets you select which language pair you'd like to
see supported. That'll let me can shoot you an email when it is ready.

~~~
lfxyz
The concept seems really interesting and I've signed up to try and improve on
my Spanish. I currently live in Amsterdam though, and there's no option in the
drop-down for learning Dutch. Is it likely to make it onto your list?

~~~
wkrause
Thanks for checking out the app. Dutch support would probably be a ways out. I
think I'm going to need to eventually decide if I want to support languages
before I have a lemmatizer in place. For me lemmatization is Langliter's
killer feature and it's core to a lot of what's going on in the app.

But others might be okay with just a reading app that works offline, provides
PoS highlighting and let's them build a vocab list (even in a less refined
way).

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wingerlang
Nice. I'm also making a language learning application and getting "real"
content (websites, tweets?, news, etc) into the app is definitely one of my
main targets.

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eafkuor
What's your language priority list? I'm learning Polish

~~~
wkrause
Italian, English, German, Russian

German might happen before English depending on how much ground I cover
supporting more navigation languages.

Beyond that I'd need to do some research on which languages to support.

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nafizh
Any chance for Arabic in the future? Looks like a great app!!

~~~
wkrause
Thanks! I'm not planning to support Arabic any time soon, but from a tools and
data set perspective it's possible. I'd just need to invest the time to
research the language and talk to users about challenges specific to that
language. Hopefully the project is successful enough that I get a chance to do
that.

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oh_sigh
Installing on my phone now. My major beef with duolingo was that it felt too
much like a game. Goddamnit, learning isn't fun and don't try to make it be!

