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Show HN: Phrasing – learn every language, to any level (phrasing.app)
127 points by barrell 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 125 comments
Hey there HN -

Today I'm sharing a demo of my our language learning tool, Phrasing. It's a tool born from the language acquisition hypothesis, too many hours in an anki slog, and a strange desire to always be learning obscure languages.

The method is simple:

1. type in a show

2. learn the most important words

3. watch the show/acquire the words

4. review the words when needed in the future.

On top of that, we're trying to:

- do some novel things with spaced repetition (no more anki slog)

- expand the sort of content you can learn from (I want to to refresh my French by reading The Stormlight Archive)

- make an insanely beautiful tool for all languages (I want to learn Sanskrit and Hawaiian and such)

I think we're off to a great start so far, and I'm happy to be able to share what we have already! We've taken some of our core features, and ripped them out to put them on a playground for HN to explore. There's so much more to come though, this is just the beginning.

I'll be here all day to answer any questions. Thanks for checking it out and have a wonderful day <3

EDIT: This link was meant as a demo so hacker news has something to click around on (as per the rules of Show HN). The main marketing page can be found at https://phrasing.app/ - I think that's causing some confusion




> The hardest part about learning a language is knowing what to learn.

I disagree with this. The hardest part about learning a language is finding content and resources in the target language that are both engaging and comprehensible at your current level. It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient.

The parts of the language you need to learn will reveal themselves to you through your interaction with it. And then, either your brain will figure it out intuitively, or you'll be able to look things up if they remain a mystery.

Perhaps being equipped with a base set of phrases will increase your range in the very beginning, but that does involve offloading a lot of comprehension work to your brain's CPU, rather than letting it be handled by your brain's in-built language processor GPU. I'm suspicious about any such strategy for language learning.

Context clues that accompany the language input are a much more powerful way to make language comprehensible, compared to memorizing phrases and adding strain to your already busy brain.


I'm not sure we entirely disagree.

The idea here is to load your RAM with enough information so you can go and interact with the language, and you have enough critical 'hooks' to start to boot up your GPU. Then once you've done that, you should have some good memories that you can start to commit to long term storage, should you choose

(did I go too far with the computer analogies? I feel like it broke down).

Either way, I think we say in several places, no app is going to replace the learning that happens from interacting with the content. _That's_ where you actually learn. Our sole purpose is to get you to be able to interact with it as fast as possible, with as little gymnastics as possible.


No, I think you're doing good with that analogy still. My own spitball was half baked anyway. To some extent, conscious consideration of phrases and meanings of things can and do happen, but learning on it as the primary source for comprehension is so painful. And it's what we do in most grammar-heavy courses, and strategies based on memorizing phrases.


A recent example that comes to mind is I wanted to refresh my Italian by watching my favorite TV show in an Italian dub. Even though I can converse in Italian, and quite the show by heart, I couldn’t really follow the program.

Loading it up into Phrasing tells me that the most important words to the episode were: conservitorship, inheritance, deep submerge vehicle, treason, philanthropies, ransom, nerve gas, and anaphylactic shock.

If I’m going to spend any time on flashcards or SRS, these are the cards I want to learn. Once I know these words, not only could I follow half the episode even if I didn’t speak Italian, but the other 99% of the language in the episode has something to “latch onto” while I’m passively watching it.

I fully expect 95% of my progress in Italian to come from watching the tv show. But I expect to be able to significantly improve the speed of that progress with Phrasing.


Nicely said. It seems like you're familiar with Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis? My daughter speaks German and Swedish very proficiently just from watching hours and hours over a few years of ZDF/ARD/usw (German tv networks) and Barnakalan (Swedish kids network) on the iPad. I can't say it was a wise to let her be on the iPad for that many hours a day, but it did work, she did acquire the languages.


Yes! I'm a big fan, and have even tested the theory out on myself to great effect. I learned French using the series "French in Action", along with certain other sources of input. I was watching and rewatching each episode, and listening on repeat to its audio which I downloaded. Less than a year in I was listening to the radio, and now, two years in, I can listen and read to almost anything online. I'm behind on more casual speech and slang, but am planning to move to France so that I may finally get it.

Meanwhile, I have hardly ever had the chance to speak or write it. I seriously doubt that I've "output" more than a hundred sentences. Perhaps I've spoken some gibberish sentences now and then on my my way to work, but never for any practical purpose. Yet my comprehension is doing okay!


How many hours a day were you putting in?


To answer your question: I don't know, but probably at least 4 hours of listening a day in the beginning, gradually decreasing.

The first few months were intense, I remember. My prioritizing was detrimental to a couple of other aspects of life. Every day I wanted to get in some "active study", i.e. watching the current few episodes of FIA over again, trying to understand more this time of the latest one I was working on. And any free moment I had, walking somewhere or going shopping, I'd pop my earbuds in and listen in a more laid back way.

In the very beginning I also figured that my ear and brain needed practice at simply differentiating all these weird new vowels and sounds, so I played French noises almost constantly, including at night and when working. In hindsight, I think only the night time sounds were a smart decision.

Yet despite my dedication being a lot and the project affecting my life, I was always somehow ashamed of my lack of conviction and effort, when hearing about other learners doing "AJAT" or equivalents (All Japanese, All the Time). There are crazier stories our there!

The sad thing also is that I don't think it would be necessary to go so hard at ot to accomplish what I have. An hour or two a day of more optimal input (what I claim is so hard to find), might get you a really long way in the same amount of time. I do not know. My experiment, however, was testing whether I could acquire a language without speaking it, which it did confirm at least to me.


> Barnakalan

Barnkanalen (Barn = children, kanalen = "the channel")


Yep! Early morning typo. Thanks


> It's hard to find books, shows, or conversation partners, all the way through that critical awkward stage from beginner to vaguely proficient.

Children's books? Children also learn from scratch. I think an adult reading books targeted to progressively higher ages would do reasonably.


Children are native speakers. This is something that doesn't quite hit you until you seriously undertake language learning.

assuming we are talking about children's content in general (and not content for babies), you will find that it is not much more comprehensible than the adult stuff.

a language learning beginner is nowhere near the command or vocabulary of a child.


Yeah, I've been learning German for about a year and a half now through a combination of traditional classes and duolingo. I'm roughly high A2, low B1. I've tried multiple times to start reading children's books (e.g. Die Kleine Hexe, Emil und die Detektiv, Das doppelte Lottchen, Der Räuber Horzenplotz) which are all, supposedly, for readers under 10. They have a surprisingly large required vocabulary and grasp on the grammar.

I think part of the problem is that adult learners learn things in a sequence. They learn one part of grammar, then the next, then the next, so that there are grammar rules and structures that you are almost completely unaware of until pretty far into your learning. Whereas a native child is exposed to the entire language all at once. They don't fully understand everything, but they are aware of all of the different structures. Children's books know this and are written with it in mind, as opposed to things like readers, which restrict their grammar to a particular level. I have a much easier time reading an A2 reader than any actual childrens book.


I am a native speaker in German and I can tell you that while all the books you listed are children’s books, they are all quite old, and the words and phrases they use are weird, to say the least. Maybe grab a Lustiges Taschenbuch? They’re available almost everywhere, fun to read also for adults and since they are comics, the accompanying images provide context.


That's probably what I get for asking my older German-speaking relatives for book suggestions, haha. Thanks for the recommendation!


My experience from learning from childrens books has not been very good. They tend to be quite whimsical, which is hard to follow, use quite old language, which is hard to follow, and use really child-appropriate language, which is hard to follow.

Getting to a middle-school or YA level though, and increasing through reading levels there, is probably the best thing you can do for your language (and phrasing was built specifically to make this level accessible to you before your language level is high enough).

PS: Childrens books work on Phrasing too, so this isn't inherently biased in that respect, just my genuine opinion.


As an adult, finding children's books to be engaging is... well, a tad difficult.


I used to think the same, and I admit that having children yourself is deff a factor, but I have been surprised by how good kids books and shows can be these days.

Nothing to do when I was a kid, so I would not rule it out.


The hardest part is being consistent and acrually using it. I have seen someone less tha. 80 IQ speaking their native language and understand the grammar better than someone with Havard degree both fluency in speaking and expressing their thoughts. The main reason is one have to use it day in day out, the other learn it as "subject" to past exam. Why so many people use babbel and resulted in not able to use the language. Spend 15mins, while native speakers spent 12hrs a day. Polyglots also use this forced immersion. Except they dont want to "brag" they learn that way. Instead just want to show how easy they learn ... naturally.


Yes, consistency is key, but if you're smart about it, it doesn't have to be hard.

The trick is rather to make consistency easy. My own strategy there is aligned with most language enthusiasts: Make your input and conversations engaging! Make them so engaging you partake in those activities independently of the language, or better yet, in spite of the language. Make engagement automatic!

As an example, I've come to adore the French YT channel "ScienceEtonnante", and now watch anything published by it ASAP. I started watching it because I have a masters in physics, and found much of the jargon very easy to pick up as it's often similar to English. That left only the particularities of French itself for my brian to figure out. Now that I can simply lean back and enjoy the show, that is also what I do! It has become my favorite YT channel.


Congrats on the launch! As of now it feels like your target audience, or at least those that would understand what this might be, are people that probably have already spent a lot of time in language learning communities and understand some of what you're going for. For instance, I see "Shadowing" on one of the pages as a feature, which, if I wasn't aware of Alexander Arguelles' work, I'd have no idea what this was. Same with a lot of this parallel text stuff, if I didn't own Assimil courses I might not know that having parallel texts is a powerful way of learning. I think it could be helpful to break down how this would work more clearly for people that might not have much background in these sorts of methods.

I'd be really interested in trying this out if you had Bengali as a language option. It's a notoriously underrepresented language by language learning publishers, despite being the 6th most spoken language in the world [1] with a very rich, 1000+ year history of poetry and a people that literally fought a war in some part for their language [2].

Again, congrats on the launch -- now comes the hard part!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement


Hey, thanks so much for the kind words!

Our target audience is definitely polyglots/advanced learners at the moment - mostly just due to time. We'll definitely get to the point where everything is explained - the only thing we're lacking atm is time :)

We've got some ideas to remove the limit on languages at some point this year. In the meantime I wonder if it's possible to use Hindi or Kannada TTS with Bengali. I'd be happy to work with you to try and get it working! It's very important for us to eventually support all languages.


The regular homepage is super laggy for me.

It also doesn't explain what the product actually is.

For example, I clicked on "TV shows" and it says:

> Just search for your favorites > You type in the name of the TV show you want to watch, and we'll do the heavy lifting. With over one million episodes at your fingertips, we've got you covered.

So... is this app a media streaming service? Does it host all this content or does it require me to pay for it? Is it legal? How does this help me learn languages - will it provide subtitles? Spoken audio dubbing? Are these AI-generated or does it fetch from existing translation resources?

If it's AI-generated I cannot possibly see how it'll be accurate.

Way too many questions.


I mean, I'm sorry your experience wasn't great. But this is fantastic feedback, so thank you for that.

We're working on an FAQ section, we'll make sure these are all answered there. If you were genuinely asking here, I'm also happy to go through each point individually.

Although the 2 most important things: yes everything is legal, no we try to stay away from AI generation for the core product (although we allow it of course)


I recognize this comment has little to do with this post, but as a fellow obscure language aficionado, I just wanted to recommend probably most obscure language I’m legitimately interested in called Modern Indo European. It’s a conlang that takes the reconstructed Proto Indo European and fills in the missing parts to turn it into a usable language.

That’s all, just wanted to give them a shoutout.

———

I’m also an avid language learner myself, and I feel like what has worked for me has been to study a wide range of words with Anki, but then also try to use them in conversation. Often times I wouldn’t remember the words I studied, but it would be “on the tip of my tongue”. Then the speaker would fill in the word, and from then on I would never forget the word.

Finally, I think you guys are also headed in the right direction with the idea of “expression”, because I feel it is often difficult to map words 1 to 1 with a language you already know. Oftentimes the expression will be said differently “my name is” vs “to me the name is”. The idea is to capture a unit of meaning in a set expression and to be able to combine the expressions to communicate.


This sounds like a good topic for an HN submission! what's the best article about it?


I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks.

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; 子供たちが「自分はこの人たちとは違う。 自分はこの世界に向いていない」と思ったとしても彼らを責められまい。


To be clear, some of the example translations given for Japanese seem to be for the wrong parts of the documents.

Phrasing English: I am not suited to this world.

Phrasing Japanese: それなのに大人たちは、自分たちのやっている事が好きだと言い張る。

Actual meaning: Despite this, adults insist that they like what they do.

Phrasing English: It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do.

Phrasing Japanese: 数十億人のうち、おそらく二、三十万人といったところだろう。 好きな仕事を見つけるのは難しい。

Actual meaning: Probably 2-300,000 out of billions of people. It's hard to find a job you like.


I think:

  - this is supposed to be collection of parallel texts, in this example [1] in various languages, and,  
  - the principle is looking at parallel texts should help your brain make mappings between the two,   
    * eg. "daidai iro no webusaito" <-> "a website in orange".
1: https://paulgraham.com/love.html


Honestly, I would not recommend it for Japanese/Chinese atm. We're aware the quality there is really not good. We'll have to spend a couple months dedicated to these languages specifically to clean them up.

Still, we don't want to stop our users from learning any language with it, even if it's not well supported. But I've been very transparent with any of our beta testers that Chinese/Japanese are not going to be a great experience (yet!)


I'm also an advanced Japanese learner and find this disappointing. It would be great if your marketing materials said which languages you support and which you don't. It says "learn any language", but I see a lot of comments in here about oh it doesn't work well with this or that language. It makes sense to focus yourself on the languages that you actually do support. Over promise and under deliver is not the way to build trust or a good product.


To clarify, there’s nothing stopping you from learning Japanese with it. Almost all of our beta testers are polyglots, studying 5+ languages, most of them studying at least Japanese or Chinese. It’s just that the alignments don’t work well with Hanzi/Kanji - the app itself still function fine, just with a bit more manual effort

We’ve made sure to be transparent with any of our beta testers about the limitations. We also agree that more docs would be better, and they will be coming. We been discussing internally a way to grade languages… but any conversation we’ve had in that area ends up in the same place: we need users to help us grade the languages.

We very specifically do not want to focus in on just a couple languages. There are hundreds of tools out there dedicated to individual languages, and we don’t feel we have anything unique to contribute there.

Sorry if it came across disingenuous! That was not our intention. As we work with beta testers, and learned of all these languages, we will develop more documentation around the precise limits :)


It sounds like you've gone massively for breadth, at the expense of any depth. "We need users to help us grade the languages" sounds like you're asking people to pay you for the privilege of working for you. Why would I pay $10/mo, much less $100/mo, if I have to figure out for myself what content is good and bad?

What I want as a learner is for someone else to give me good, accurate content; I definitely want to avoid any content in the target language which isn't native-sounding, because who knows how long it will take those bad habits to break.

One idea I had for content was something like this:

1. Start with two languages; say, English and Chinese (the first of which I'm a native speaker, the second of which I'm learning); and focus on English speakers who want to learn Chinese, and Chinese speakers who want to learn English.

2. Start with some basic content in both languages; from Tatoeba, from wikipedia, whatever. And hire a few native speakers of both languages to review, validate, and rate content.

3. Give new users some amount of credit for free; enough for them to use it for a few months.

4. Once they're out of credit, they have two choices: They can either pay a flat monthly fee, or they can contribute back to the content: Writing new content, reviewing & validating content, rating content, etc. And people could do whatever mix they want.

5. Expand to other languages as you grow.

I definitely see the attraction of trying to use automation to expand as far and wide as possible, but I think that ultimately it's more important to start by doing a few things well than by doing 50 things poorly.


I want to know how well supported each language is. Rate support as Alpha, Beta, Full so I can decide if I want to use your app.


Two unrelated items:

I had very good results many years ago polishing the last steps of my French while in France. My tutor used very novel and interesting short articles, one example was a short article about shrimp found in a cave with no light. At the time this was a novel bit of information and quite interesting on its own. I think an effort to find novel and educational information to learn from is an effort well worth the time.

Please add Albanian. I should learn this language but I am not motivated enough. I would definitely give your tool a proper test run.


We will look into Albanian! We have some ideas on how to remove the language restrictions sometime this year.

When it comes to educational content, one of the things I'm most excited for is to have the stuff I'm learning hooked up into an SRS _and_ in another language. Not only will I remember things better because I'm learning it in another language, but I'll learn the other language better because I'm interested in the content.

Although I'm most interested in turning stories into language learning content. Instead of 'Jack was in the park in summer'', something like "John Snow stood on the wall in winter" I would expect to elad to much stronger memories.


There will be two broad types of people: those with interest in fiction, and those who prefer non-fiction. The more you can offer something from each group, and from a few different genres / areas in those subgroups, the more people will be able to find their sweet spot.

For extra credit, analyze which subjects each person is learning the best from, and give them more of that. Eventually you should be able to find patterns and know when to switch things up by finding each person's learning cadences... romance, romance, chemistry, nature, romance, etc.

Out of curiosity I tried chatGPT with a simple: "please give me a list of ten interesting facts about the life of polar bears". It was ok. I got better results with: "can you rewrite that list, providing more unique, novel facts about polar bears? Things most people would not know?"


For what it's worth, we're cooking up a lot of fun stuff with vector embeddings along these lines. For now we've decided on getting the product stable and launched, although everything is set up to go in this direction.


> turning stories into language learning content

Great idea. It could be simple cloze deletion from the content pasted in, or are you thinking to use AI to create simplified expressions with similar semantics?


Do you have a personal connection with Albania that would lead you to learn it? I traveled through Albania for 2 months and literally never met a person who didn't speak English or Italian...but maybe I just didn't go to the areas where people only speak Albanian.


Not all Albanians speak another language, especially among the older generations who have a lot of wisdom to impart. And yes, of course I have reasons to learn it.


In the landing page I could see this for French :

"Toujours produire" découvrira le métier de ta vie de la même façon que l'eau, aidée par la gravité, trouve le trou dans ton toit.

If you replace the first two words by "tu", and correct a minor mistake in the third one (add a "s" at the end), it has a meaning but otherwise not. I guess we cannot trust it to learn a language then.


I believe that came from the official translation for paul graham's essay, but their site is down now and I can't confirm: https://penelope.jdsfriends.com/DWYL_francais.htm

Not saying it's correct, but it's definitely only going to be as good as it's inputs. If we gave it a bad translation, that's on us! Sorry


If you do any sort of automatic attempts to discover parallel texts (and I can't understand how you can support "any show" otherwise), you're going to run into the problem of terrible translations, most of them made with machines.


You're also going to get figurative translations instead of literal ones.


Sorry, I had not seen the english version it was the translation for. Both French and English version look awkward, they must be read in context ^^;


I'm learning French too but I can't see the mistakes you're pointing out... What would be the correct sentence?


Well, I think that it actually has a meaning once you read it in context. Taken out of context it makes a really awkward sentence and made me think of an AI halucination....


Looks really interesting, unfortunately your sign up page is throwing a “Email rate limit exceeded” error, and the e-mail field is painfully slow to type in (iPhone), guessing some kind of React state recursion gone wrong.


Same on Android. The UI on that page is very sluggish


I don't understand what this is. This landing page actually made me annoyed :) .

I doubt you will get many conversions based on current landing page.

> Try clicking around on some of the words below - and make sure to give the audio a listen!

OP I clicked on the text and bunch of tags popped up. I wasn't sure what those tags are or what I am supposed to do after that.


Please be kind. That doesn't stop you being critical, but try and be kind and more helpful.

What's confusing? It's clearly a language learning app, with various features that it seems like the landing page leads you through. The HN link is to the playground, which also does explain things.

Where are you getting stuck?

Perhaps these may help OP improve the page.

edit - I see the comment has been updated to be softened, which I think is a good choice.


You are right. I added some feedback for OP about where I got stuck.


It's worth mentioning that this is a playground specifically for Show HN (technically I don't think you're just supposed to post landing pages for private products). The home page is a bit more 'standard'. Perhaps that's clearer for you?

Cleaning up the grammatical information to make it a bit less information dense is definitely on our todo list though.


We're working on it constantly! We just released the home page last week and we've been collecting feedback on it.

If you have any lingering questions you're left with after seeing the home page, please let us know. That way we can add those to a list of questions we're trying to get sure get answered in any future updates!


It's a place to learn languages.

Like Rust or Go.

:)


The page doesn't make a good job communicating what it offers. There's a lot of unimportant fluff, generic "we're the best", but I didn't really understand what the app offers beyond showing the same phrase in multiple languages.


Try https://phrasing.app/

The /playground link I posted to HN was meant to give HN something to click around on. The root index page is meant to be the primary marketing materials.


So what does it actually do to youtube videos? The landing page doesn't cover this. Should I expect that the video I watch will be in my target language now? As in, it'll be dubbed in the new language? That'd be super useful but I'm unclear and I'm not paying $10 to find out.

A time-limited example or something similar would be really useful. Maybe just one that you pick. Whatever it may be, I'd love to see how it actually works before paying money for it. Assuming it dubs videos, how does it handle multiple speakers?


We're definitely going to get there! For what it's worth, nobody has been signed on yet without receiving a tour and demonstration of the product, and nor would I expect anyone to pay money without having seen the product.

Sometime this week or next we will work on recording videos of the whole experience, and making them available. Then another thing to do this quarter is automatic payments, payment portals, trials, etc.

We didn't think we should delay 'launching' any longer though.


Sounds great! I'm excited to see what y'all end up having to offer! For what it's worth, if you can pull off auto-dubbing in the language I choose in a natural way I'd be on board 100%


The French example is horrible. Barely sensical, very weird, absolutely not what a native person would write nor say. It looks like something someone who barely speaks French would produce.


Agree. As a native speaker, I found these examples to be weird at best. No way any native would write or speak like that.


When we built this demo we figured the official translations would be well translated, apparently they are not.

Some people elsewhere in the comments are saying it's just a weird English sentence so it has a weird French sentence. My French is no good enough to critique on it's nativeness though


""Toujours faire quelque chose" vous amènera à trouver le travail de votre vie de la même façon que la gravité amène l'eau jusqu'au trou dans votre toit."

(Paul Graham is a very poor writer, and his image doesn't mean much to Europeans, who don't live much in individual, shoddily-made houses the way Americans do)


Hi there! I’m getting an “Email rate limit exceeded” error when I try to register, just FYI.


Supabase has been having issues all day, it's possible now their auth is down :') we haven't received enough traffic to bring it down yet.

EDIT: was able to confirm that my supabase instance can't connect to the auth service at the moment. 99% uptime but of course the 1% downtime is when you launch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Given the prominent mentions of OpenAI I'm going to guess this doesn't use actual human translators but instead relies on machine translations using OpenAI?

This is literally what created a drastic decrease in the overall quality of Duolingo. I wouldn't trust an app like this if it's relying on machine translations, AI or not. Especially when it comes to learning phrases and real-world examples. Translation is hard. Machine translation is even harder. Machine translation for languages with limited sample sizes (e.g. "Sanskrit an Hawaiian") is nearly impossible.

The only way to make this thing pass an even remotely reasonable bar for quality would be to hire humans to train it but at the rates required to keep this thing profitable that borders on exploitation.


Ideally we're not creating any of the translations ourselves - although of course we support machine translation. Our goal is to turn any native (or professionally translated) material into language learning materials.

We also have lots of ideas for 'Humans in the loop', verification, etc. But while we use AI for _a lot_ of things, we're trying to stay as far away from 'generate some Sanskrit' or 'translate <english text> to Sanksrit'


Not to nitpick, but I found this is a bit ironic:

"Phrasing works by finding you two documents, in two different languages, and connecting them sentence by sentence with eachother. While we're add it, we clean things up, score them, and analyze their relevance in each language."


haha yeah, maybe I should at english to my list of languages ;P


Nice work, good application of GPT to language learning and FSRS is definitely the new standard too

I built something similar, Manabi Reader, currently only for Japanese on iOS/macOS but expanding to more languages shortly.

I built it as a native app so that it behaves like a web browser - no sharing your data with providers, offline friendly, no worry about what copyrighted material users might consume. It tracks the words and kanji you read and learn, showing your incremental progress against JLPT levels.

I’ve built an AI app for BYOK OpenAI plus local LLMs that I’m integrating into Manabi Reader as a free feature to add these kind of LLM features

It has a flashcard app or lets you mine expressions directly into Anki

https://reader.manabi.io


Hey thanks for the kind words! I have to also give you props back - Manabi reader is awesome, I've known the project for a while.


Hi!

I would love to try this. I am currently on my 7th language so I am always excited to find language learning apps. So far none of them has beaten a good old language course and consuming media in the language.

Maybe the website has received a bit too much love but I am trying to search for a TV show and the UI is not reacting at all (I entered "How I Met Your Mother" in the textbox below "How to do what you love" on the playground page).

A bit of a strange question I have is who created the pictures for your updates page? The style reminds me of Raycast marketing material which I find incredibly beautiful. I really like the optics, is there a name for this style?

All the best!


Hey! So the search box is part of a demo of an article we aligned. For the Playground, we just have some example content to show how it works (we wanted to share to HN but we didn't want to do so without giving people something to play with). We could have made that more clear.

In the actual application, you're correct, you just type in the show name and it will look it up for you. That's just not this page :)

With regards to the design, I think it's been dubbed 'Aurora UI'. We have a large figma files with dozens of similar sources, I think raycast is one of them haha


Impressive project, but the tagline says "learn every language," and yet there are some very glaring omissions. Just a few off the top of my head: Haitian Creole, Breton, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Scots, and Yoruba. But probably the biggest omission is Esperanto, the world's most popular auxiliary language, which is often used as a bridge to other languages. If you learn Esperanto as your first foreign language, it's much easier to learn other languages, so it should be front-and-center in any language learning app.


Heh yeah that was just brought to my attention. It's kind of always been the mission of the project, and what we've been building internally. We've been adding 20 languages a month since we started, and we're not planning on stopping anytime soon - but indeed there are a lot of language missing at the moment.

By the time we're out of beta we will support every language, give us a couple months to make good on that headline!


I looked at some of the Hungarian translations and some are way off or even unrelated to the English version. I would have thought a year or two ago that this is simply a database lookup / array indexing problem, or is this something that qualifies as an LLM hallucinating? The former issue could be confidently resolved in a matter of hours, the latter makes me completely distrust the whole project.

I do like the UX tho, and find it a good idea that you created a HN-related landing page. Seems like a good amount of work went into this, congrats!


I look forward to giving user feedback when I’m able to signup.

> our Humane Spaced repeition system. Based off of the popular FSRS, our Spaced Repeition System will adapt to your review style. Take a few weeks off? No problem. Want to study ahead one day? No problem. Took a 2 year vacation? We're jealous, but we've got you covered.

I really resonate with this. I find that after a long break, I have forgotten a lot less than Anki’s algorithm believes.

Is there some reasonably scientific reference for this? I mean, I’d be interested to read someone’s study or theories here.


FSRS has been available in Anki via extensions for more than a year, and recently landed natively. It can be enabled in deck settings with a toggle. https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs


I know Anki uses a modified version of SM2 so I can't say for certain, but if I recall correctly they are still using a linear algorithm. Most forgetting curves are, well, curved. More logarithmic.

Once you go too far away from the 'due date', the algorithms decent quickly to "0% chance of recall", where in actual memory it's more similar to a half-life.

It's been a couple years though since I've worked with that algorithm


Well for one thing, Anki is using an ancient SuperMemo algorithm. I wouldn’t take Anki as a benchmark in terms of spaced repetition effectiveness.


anki doesn't use the ancient sm algo anymore

anki uses fsrs but afaik it still "punishes" you for taking breaks


It does still use SM2 by default -- you have to turn on FSRS manually. https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs


You can set easy days via the FSRS4Anki Helper add-on: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/759844606

And it also supports to postpone your backlog.


As others pointed out, SM-2 is apparently still the default.

FSRS would indeed be more interesting, as it seems to be heavily “inspired” by SM-18.


I don’t know where the translations are coming from, but the quality of the Turkish/English translation was lacking. Unfortunately, It does not inspire enough confidence for me to use this tool.


The same is the case for the "Spanish" example, which is only barely understandable and lacks basic grammatical gender concordance:

> Una carrera comparativamente segura y próspera con algún prestigio básico automático es peligrosamente tentador para alguien joven, que no ha pensado mucho sobre lo que le gusta realmente.

If that's what's being presented for the world's 2nd most spoken native language and 4th most spoken overall, I shudder to think what the ostensible "Polish" equivalent phrasing is like:

> Porównawczo bezpieczna i dostatnia kariera z pewnym automatycznym prestiżem jest niebezpiecznie kusząca dla młodej osoby, która nie zastanawiała się zbytnio nad tym, co naprawdę lubi.


Hmmm we assumed that the translations for the Paul Graham essays would have been properly translated. Someone else pointed out a French issue earlier, both the French and Spanish examples were taken from their 'official' translation. Now I'm questioning everything. Unless we seriously messed up a copy and paste, it's possible we just used a bad source.

It is a bring-your-own materials type of app, so if you bring an authentically translated work, you avoid this problem. We try not to do any translation ourselves (although we of course allow it for convenience if you choose it)


It reads as a direct word for word translation of English as opposed to native speaker conveying the overall meaning using native language idioms and such. Its very difficult to translate things word for word and have them sound „native”. That’s why when you have side by side text is something complex, like a novel, translating authors often take creative license with text to make it sound reasonable.


the Italian ones are not perfect either, e.g.

> in realtà ad essi sono state dette tre bugie: le cose che sono state insegnate a scuola riguardo al lavoro non sono il vero lavoro;

> actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work;

the first sentence is ok, but the latter is different: the Italian version says "the things they have been told about work is not the actual work".

This is an actually different meaning of the sentence.

And the first Hungarian example is weird too, e.g.

> Kivágnak az iskolából, vagy új utakon jársz?

has some greek translation where "τολμηρά" appears and the english translation gets "boldly carving a new path".

The literal translation would be "you walk new paths", I do not believe there is any boldness or carving involved. These are just different meanings.


The demo article only had a couple translations, so we auto-translated some missing ones. Sorry the Turkish one isn't great!

Most of the app we try to encourage you to use professionally translated works to learn whichever language you're studying, so try to do as we say not as we do :D


As I’ve commented elsewhere, to the extent you are using machine translation: note that GPT is bad at translation to languages other than English. Telltale sign is not declining for gender. I saw this a lot with GPT4’s Polish. Better to use one of the standard translation services.


This looks really nice, I built something similar, mostly focused on podcasts now:

https://www.langturbo.com

I built something more complex before, that had YouTube content, AI shadowing tests, some built in SRS, but I chose to focus on the most important things first.

I actually started building my app due to the frustration of not finding any "intermediate level" apps. Good to see more options out there. Good luck.


"Every language" sounds like a massive stretch. Then again I come from a country of 200+ different languages, so maybe my expectations are a tad higher than most.

Unfortunately, given the reliance on machine translations, I don't expect it to be a useful learning tool for most of those languages any time soon.

As an aside I'm curious about your voices, especially for highly tonal languages like Yoruba that also don't necessarily have a lot of easily trainable material available.


While we offer people the ability to do machine translations, there's absolutely no reliance on them. We actively advise against using machine translations when onboarding new users

It's a good point about the "every language" part. That's really the goal of the project - we've been adding about 20 languages a month since we started, and don't plan to stop until we support every language. However we're not there yet, give us a few more months to live up to that ;)

We have some ideas for languages that don't have widely available TTS, but we're not ready to share anything quite yet.


Ah! To be clear I was going off of other comments, and also omitted some of the steps in my logic. Basically I mean that the project seems to rely on third-party-sourced translations of material which are themselves often machine-translated, and that support for new languages seems to be added through machine translation (though I suppose these days we call it AI instead). To be clear this is as opposed to something like Duolingo, which hires humans to translate its available material.


> don't plan to stop until we support every language. However we're not there yet, give us a few more months to live up to that

You know there are about 7000 languages in the world, right? Most of them with 0 or near 0 presence on the internet.


Yes! I mean, we won't supply the content for all 7,000 languages, but we can make the core learning process and core pipeline language agnostic, so you could learn any language.

With the exception of sign languages of course, as those will require their own processes and pipelines.


Don't you worry that the ways of language acquisition that work for ultra-polyglots would necessarily work for regular people?


Depends on the context - yes, I do worry that language acquisition will not work for everyone in it's normal form. It takes an intense love for languages to diligently put in the work and go through the 'trough of sorrow' and trust the process. Heck, I love languages, and I've never had the motivation to open up a subtitle track and go through it and make flashcards.

I do not worry that language acquisition will not work for everyone if we can make it accessible enough though. Blame the tools (Phrasing included if you want), not the learner!


Why? Everyone acquires language the same way.


Their first one, maybe. But I've seen first-hand how much people vary in what they manage to learn from classes.


Well, there's not that much variation. People don't learn much from classes. And you'll note that "what works for polyglots" isn't classes.


I’ve been building a hobby project with (from what I am reading on your landing page) identical goals but on a smaller scale. Please reach out if you ever want to talk. I’m pretty easy to find. https://github.com/RickCarlino/KoalaSRS


Can you add Tamil as well, it’s one of the oldest Indian Languages much like Sanskrit and has millions of Tamil Speaker spread all across South East Asia and has big Bollywood industry with lots of shows. Recently been trying to find a good app for my kids and Tamil is always missing from most language apps.


We support Tamil :) I don't think we have any voices added for Tamil, but it's possible that a Tamil speaker voice clone in Hindi could be sufficient. Would love to try!


I don't understand what the product is, and the landing page is very laggy/slow for me.

Even the HN demo is confusing, a lot of text and no header or short sentence explaining how it works.


I cannot even enter my email address, on Android/firefox


Didn’t seem to work. “Load failed” when I entered my email address. Then “email rate limit exceeded” when I tried again


Trying to sign up and getting an "Email rate limit exceeded" error.

Hopefully you see this and can keep your user sign ups flowing!


I thought the site was down, but it actually just loads very slowly (5+ seconds) on Firefox mobile. (The main page)


`env.js` is returning html for me and thus throwing an error.

Is it working for everyone else? Is this a cloudflare config problem?


hahaha this is a debugging trick we use to be able to run production builds locally through proxy servers :) is it causing issues for you (besides logging a 404)?


The phrases weren't loading for me and it was the most obvious problem. They are working now.


Could there be a naming conflict between your phrasing.app, and phrase.com, a translation management tool?


I want to try this, but "reserve a spot" is giving: "Email rate limit exceeded"


I'd like to demo this. Is it possible at the moment?


wow I love the idea of pre-learning the important words in a show then watching it to kinda cement it in. Really cool.


The landing page says the app was built by working closely with "hyperpolyglots" which are described as "people who speak 15+ languages".

For these purposes, what does "speaking" a language actually mean. Fluency? A1 level? Did the Assimil course? Bluntly: are "hyperpolygots" really just beginners in 15+ languages? Why would I want to use an app that caters to them?

The claim seems to be: do what hyperpolyglots do to learn a language. But do these people actually learn the target language and if so, to what level?


Edit: nm


I'm not sure if this is clear, but this is just a playground for Hacker News? The main homepage can be found at the root URL https://phrasing.app/

That being said, we've done exactly this, polished the landing page, and are literally working our way through all our friends and family again to refine it again. Another couple rounds and I think we might make it all clear! :D Indeed none of us are marketers so we're learning as we go :)

If you look at the waybackmachine though I think it's definitely trending in the right direction!


ok-- It was not clear to me. You might want to put a big print bit at the top of the page.


just did :)


French version looks wierd. '"Toujours produire" découvrira le métier de ta vie...'

Huh? lol




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