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Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by sebnun on Monday January 20, 2025 @02:03PM (#42771881)
Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using podcasts) [1]

I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found that I learned much better just reading things in context instead of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator of LingQ) explains this better here [2]

[1] https://www.langturbo.com

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by arbayi on Monday January 20, 2025 @03:03PM (#42772492)
Thank you so much both for your comment and for sharing your app! (there are definitely great tools out there that we're not aware of) I am very happy to find your app because I actually needed something like this! I enjoy listening while working and being able to see the transcription alongside it, with word definitions in context - this kind of learning really works for me! It's fantastic how it supports all those languages - you can listen, read, and look up definitions all in one place. Looking at this, the one I shared above looked very basic. You handle transcription, media playing, testing pronouncation, LLM interaction I guess for contextual meaning and examples... ! The only question I have (sorry if this already exists - but i couln't find it) but is there a chance I can see a list of words I've encountered and marked as known?

And for the second part, I'm planning to include SRS features @markvdb pointed out in comments, combining both contextual learning with SRS would be interested I guess.

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by claylimo on Monday January 20, 2025 @03:39PM (#42772783)
Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to learn another language.
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by arbayi on Monday January 20, 2025 @04:08PM (#42773073)
Thank you for sharing! Looking at their blog, I saw this post about learning Japanese vocabulary (https://migaku.com/blog/japanese/how-to-learn-japanese-vocab...). They share a Japanese Netflix Frequency List - (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15b3j9--RJ1K5hI9vz_2L...)

"To recognize 99% of all the words in Netflix's subtitles, you'd need to know 37,247 words"

Interesting approach! I really don't know how they managed to gather this list, but it's an interesting and clever method.

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by Alex-Programs on Monday January 20, 2025 @03:56PM (#42772946)
There's also https://nuenki.app (disclaimer: I made it), which applies the same approach to every single website*. It translates appropriate-difficulty sentences into your target language, and you can hover for definitions, pronunciations, etc.

*other than those blocked for privacy reasons

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by arbayi on Monday January 20, 2025 @04:13PM (#42773108)
I actually want to learn German, but I want to learn it by reading German texts and starting from zero, even though that makes it challenging. I need to look up definitions and such, but translating the entire page defeats the core purpose. This app in my case is just perfect match! Thank you for sharing!
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by Alex-Programs on Monday January 20, 2025 @04:22PM (#42773220)
Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback!
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by dpig_ on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @05:22PM (#42785837)
Any plans to add Hindi, being the third-most spoken language in the world?
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by Alex-Programs on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @10:16AM (#42793693)
Sure, I'll add it. It isn't supported by DeepL, so it'd have higher latency (alongside a few other languages that are Claude-only).

I can contact you when it's added, if you like - perhaps you could email alex (at) nuenki.app?

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by dpig_ on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @09:37PM (#42800030)
That would be awesome, cheers.
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by Alex-Programs on Friday January 24, 2025 @05:16AM (#42811887)
I've added it.

https://nuenki.app :)

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by dpig_ on Sunday January 26, 2025 @11:52PM (#42837546)
Love your work! Thanks.
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by davidzweig on Monday January 20, 2025 @05:11PM (#42773696)
I'll drop this here: If anyone wants to work on Language Reactor (well compensated), my email is in my profile. I'm planning to start open-sourcing much of it soon.
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by rapidpolyglot on Thursday January 23, 2025 @07:05AM (#42803199)
You should try Lingopie.com, Its like the Netflix of Lanuguage learning. It's way more developed & Polished than Migaku or Language Reactor ... Migaku is only a chrome extension and Lingopie has thousands of TV shows and movies & also works with Netflix & Disney plus. Plus it has tons of language learning features and tools that Migaku has. You can also watch and learn on iOS & Android plus on your TV with their Smart TV apps.
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by wahnfrieden on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @09:43AM (#42780617)
I built a popular integrated reader and SRS (with Anki integration as an alternative option) similar to LingQ but focused on Japanese currently

https://reader.manabi.io

[dead]
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by learning-tr on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @07:17PM (#42799023)
Wow this is super cool but how do you ensure the content is useful and correct?
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by jkoff on Saturday January 25, 2025 @06:13PM (#42825928)
To be clear, I haven't shared this with anyone because I'm not yet sure that the content is useful and correct.

As far as where I'm at: - I've listened to it in my target language for N hours. To my ear, it sounds correct and I've learned some new words that I then heard used consistently in native media. - Next, I'd like to set it to teach me a language that I already know, so that I can more reliably and easily spot errors. This will require some changes, since my target language is currently hardcoded. - Longer-term, validation based on languages I speak can't generalize 100% to other languages, nor can validation of version N make assertions about version N + 1. Correctness would benefit from native speakers periodically checking results, and usefulness would benefit from user feedback (even if only in the form of engagement or lack thereof).

Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by learning-tr on Saturday February 01, 2025 @08:01PM (#42904417)
Which LLM gave you the best pronunciation results?
Re:Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (Kind of) for Vocabulary B... by jkoff on Saturday February 08, 2025 @11:27AM (#42984057)
I first generate a script to be handed to a TTS model. For this step, Claude 3.5 Sonnet works well. For voice synthesis, I've been using Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech API and it's been adequate.