

Show HN: Learner, a German flashcard app - BillFranklin
https://billfranklin.eu/german/index

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mcbetz
German native speaker here. I don't know where you got these words from, but
they surely are not the 1000 most used German ones. Within the first 10
rounds, I got "Mitte Kritik" which is nonsense, "uns Stadt" which is
grammatically wrong (should be "unsere Stadt"/"our city") and some where the
noun must be uppercase ("Hallo welt!" must be "Hallo Welt!" for example).

The University of Leipzig has a more reliable list of common words, which you
might use with Google Sheets (GoogleTranslate(REF, "de", "en")).

[http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top1000de.txt](http://wortschatz.uni-
leipzig.de/Papers/top1000de.txt)

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BillFranklin
Thank you! This is really useful. Finding a reliable source of words and their
translations (that I could turn into a json) was the hardest part of building
this.

~~~
mcbetz
They also have a longer list with 10.000 words. [http://wortschatz.uni-
leipzig.de/Papers/top10000de.txt](http://wortschatz.uni-
leipzig.de/Papers/top10000de.txt)

Google gives you 80% right translations, a more reliable dictionary is PONS
([http://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung](http://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung)).
It also has an API, but you can only shoot 1000 free queries a month.

Another good dictionary is dict.leo.org, but unfortunately there is no API.

A last good option is dict.cc; you can download their corpus and use it
programmatically with tools like this:
[https://github.com/cofi/PDictCC](https://github.com/cofi/PDictCC)

~~~
BillFranklin
I've changed the list of words to the Leipzig uni list:
[https://billfranklin.eu/german/data.json](https://billfranklin.eu/german/data.json)

Thanks both!

~~~
detaro
Better, but still confusing or wrong sometimes. I'd recommend to get a ready-
made flash card collection from somewhere and try to import that. Especially
for conjugated forms or words that mean different things in different context
making good flash cards it gets difficult, there are abbreviations in there,
...

EDIT: or add a comment/vote function and hope that many visitors converge to a
good set ;)

~~~
spades
Or you could ask Jonas.

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wongarsu
Something that isn't handled well yet are cases where words have multiple
meanings. For example you translate "endlich" with "at last", which is
correct, but endlich also means "finite" (depending on context). Ideally, you
should indicate that both are possible translations.

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smcl
I've got something similar in-progress for the grammatical weirdness of Czech
@ [http://conjugate.cz](http://conjugate.cz).

I figured Memrise already has the "memorise the meaning" part sewn up, but
doesn't seem to work well with anything more complex.

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rambambam
I have been thinking of building some flashcard-like app for these English
words I come across all the time, but never remember (to give you an idea:
"exuberance" for example). Any integration with Google Translate would be
cool, because the moment I look up some word, it should be added as a
flashcard, together with the translation. Every time I look up a new word, I
should be tested for a few old words, to see if I still remember them.

~~~
BillFranklin
Using the Google Translate app is great as it saves the things you translate.
You could also check out [http://www.cram.com/](http://www.cram.com/) or
Memrise as I think they have account features. This is purely a 'show me the
top 1k german words' app, I might make it the top 10000 if my German improves
and build in other lists for phrases, numbers and other groups.

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italophil
I like the idea. You should look over the capitalization of nouns. The first
word term I saw was "Hallo welt!" it should be spelled "Hallo Welt!".

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Red_Tarsius
I like it. You could let the user create their own set of cards. Unlike _Anki_
your service is web-based and users would easily share their sets on fb,
twitter... sort of "SlideShare meets Anki".

EDIT: I didn't know there's already _cram.com_.

~~~
hammerandtongs
[https://ankiweb.net/](https://ankiweb.net/)

Lots of shared/syncable content up for anki actually.

The biggest problem has more to do with the differences of what people are
studying from one say german or math class to another.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
whoops, I had no clue about the web counterpart.

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Tomte
Single words aren't too useful, because there are many ambiguities. You'd
better use simple sentences.

Another thing: Be very careful about capitalization.

I just got "Sie means they". Yes. In a way.

But the "sie" that you mean is written with a lower-case "s" (unless at the
beginning of a sentence, of course).

So my immediate reaction was: this must be the form of address "Sie".

Of course, had you shown "sie", the first thought would have gone towards
"sie" as in "she"…

Just use sentences that resolve those ambiguities.

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BillFranklin
If anyone would like to help build this or make your own the code is here
under MIT license

[https://github.com/bilbof/Deutsch-app](https://github.com/bilbof/Deutsch-app)

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melling
I've got a free iOS app for learning German:
[http://bit.ly/1dpZctq](http://bit.ly/1dpZctq)

In addition to word lists, there are over 1000 pictures and several games.

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gabchan
Add "suggest better translation" feature please

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gabchan
This strangely reminds me of rapscript.de

Just add music ;)

~~~
BillFranklin
Haha, the music is great!
[http://rapscript.de/words.html](http://rapscript.de/words.html)

But they don't show you the translations :(

