
Show HN: Better Bilingual Texts for Language Learning - davidzweig
http://smallworld.press/show_hn.html?hn
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lozzo
Very interesting work. Good luck with it. As a father of a bilingual child I
was happy to stumble on this while browsing hacker news.

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nkkollaw
This is really awesome, I absolutely love it.

I've been trying to read dual text books in Polish and I did have the problem
of Polish sentences being about 500 times longer than English. Personally, I
solved it parsing the text for paragraphs and realining everything with
shorter sentences.

Your solution definitely works better.

In case you're looking for feedback, I wouldn't use color as it both looks
highlighted, and wouldn't allow highlighting. How about a 1px black outline to
differenciate?

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davidzweig
Thanks!

Previously, when making materials for my own use, I used to put the paste the
texts into spreadsheets, with one sentence per line/cell. It works well.

This layout is only used for printed books (at the moment). Without the color
it looks more elegant, it's true. I'll try the outline.

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nkkollaw
> Previously, when making materials for my own use, I used to put the paste
> the texts into spreadsheets, with one sentence per line/cell. It works well.

Yup. I created a script that would parse paragraphs, and create an HTML table
automatically, with one row/sentence. This way at least you know where you are
in the sentence :-)

Are you interested in language learning, or was this a one-time project?

I have a crazy project in mind, if you'd be interested in joining forces
perhaps it would be more feasible to do it.

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davidzweig
I've got a lot of language projects. The latest one is a very low-cost,
programmable audio player (no screen even, but lots of buttons and colored
LEDs). You create non-linear, interactive materials. I was going to make
another 'Show HN' when I have the firmware ready.

Send me an email (on my profile), I'm interested to hear your idea.

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j_s
Nice; added to my wishlist. Thanks!

"The El Principito / The Little Prince Spanish/English Bilingual Edition with
Audio Download (English and Spanish Edition)"
[https://amzn.com/dp/1999706110/](https://amzn.com/dp/1999706110/) $18.69
paperback

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davidzweig
Here's a project I spent quite a lot of time on last summer. I filled quite a
few notebooks with doodles and half-ideas and spent a lot of time staring at
nothing with (likely) a confused look on my face.

