It's always a good initiative to build something on your own.
Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users.
Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts.
I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language.
The very first items were:
1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better)
2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour
Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting Guten Morgen is wrong, correcting me to Hallo.
Then it asked me what Bonjour means again, this time Guten Morgen is correct.
So yeah, good initiative, but please just tell me what it is and don't lie.
The issue here is a simple bug. We have two pairs for that specific lesson:
- Hello <-> Bonjour
- Good morning <-> Bonjour
They are identified by the question's id. And by the id we find the answer, and this is a bug where we show you one of the Bonjours, and only one of the answers is right per id. It's just a bug, that we already have mechanics for, but it's not always perfect. The course is still tested by linguists and native speakers.
I'm no German speaker, but I'm French, and without invalidating your initial claim (about the AI generated stuff), in France we do translate "good morning" by "Bonjour", which literally means good (bon) day (jour).
Any other translation would be weird:
if you'd translate "good morning" by "Bonne journée" -> that would be super weird, because this is something one could say in France to say "Goodbye" xD
I lived in Germany for a short time back in 2022, and notice that saying "Hallo" is used a little bit everywhere. However I can tell you that you are NOT supposed to say "salut" in France ANYWHERE except with your friends.
Like, imagine, you're in Germany you enter a bakery, you can say "Hallo" -> no problem.
Same situation in France and you say "Salut" -> either people will react badly or assume that you don't know French or maybe they'll think you're impolite for no reasons
Agreed - the landing page specifically claims “Over 700 expert-crafted courses for any language pair imaginable.”
I’m a trust-but-verify kind of person, and I can’t find a single mention of any language-learning facilities, academies, linguists, native speakers, or anything else that would corroborate this.
In other words, the system is designed so that any learning the speaker attempts somehow ends up being scored wrong, forcing the speaker to conclude they will always be identified by the system as an error-prone, non-native speaker yearning for acceptance by ears trained from childhood to hear cracks in any facade the speaker slaps together, forever and ever...
Sounds like the author unwittingly taught you the first lesson. :)
I watched the demo. It looks like a clone of duolingo. Can you do a better job of explaining how this is different? What features does it have that duo doesn't. How does the app push you to those features vs just falling into the same pattern as duo?
You say you learned Turkish with lairner. What level of fluency did you achieve? Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension?
Edit: I'm not trying to be argumentative, I see a lot of people come on Show HN with these fantastic projects but are poorly marketed. You seem to have some differentiator but I'm not seeing it in action. I wish you the best success with this, and I can assure you, if it's as good as you say I will be your biggest customer and fan.
Not really. Fluency is probably closer to 70-95% comprehension, combined with an ability to assume the rest. I assume the comment is talking about native level comprehension, which is still only like 99.99%
Source: native English speaker in Europe. I have to explain/reword several words/expressions per day to people who would be by all means considered fluent.
(all numbers in this comment were estimated based on experience)
I wouldn't consider anyone "fluent" who has only 70% comprehension. More like 90%+. If you're assuming things based on context that is a marker of a low level of comprehension.
Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.
I would say "full comprehension" would mean you don't need words and phrases explained to you on a daily basis.
And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%.
Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension.
I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency".
Nonsense, that's called 'learning a language' and is done by many who move abroad. I'm Dutch but more or less fluent in English and Swedish, can come quite far in German and make myself understood in and understand French. I'd have to learn local idioms in any of those countries, including the Netherlands since some expressions are really local and don't see much of any use outside of the village or county.
Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?
> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.
I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?
Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.
This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...
Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.
I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)
This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.
I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.
So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)
Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!
If the point of learning a language was to say new words to yourself, you can just make up words.
If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.
I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.
I gave a go with a less popular language. This is a clone of Duolingo from the first glance, and does not place you into a correct level after examination.
Funny vibe code glitche in how an excersirce gives away the answer in a transaction of each question.
Here to answer some of these questions:
We offer a huge part of our corpus for free, and we offer a super cheap Premium offer in order to still make some money.
We use linguists, teachers, and native speakers to curate our courses, but we're a small team of three people who just started this a few months ago, not all of our content is yet verified and corrected.
We're working together with 2 institutions for endangered languages, offer them a "cms"-like interface to host their own courses alongside our existing courses.
Yes, there are bugs. Yes, placements aren't great. But we're working on it! Goal is: Combinations. Make it possible to learn French from Arabic. Make it possible to learn Igbo from German. And so on. There's no fraud involved (how even do you imagine anything fraudulent here, it's a language learning app with a massive free tier), we're just trying to make it accessible.
Thanks for all the feedback, this filled up our backlog for surely a few weeks.
As an learning (and conversational) Khmer speaker, I tried the Khmer module.
It's an absolute disaster in both romanization of Khmer characters and pronounciation. Simple words like 'arkun' are pronounced _very_ incorrectly and the romanization is incomprehensible.
Tried this with german as native language and greek as language I want to learn.
First question: Wie steht es um Ihr Greek?
Greek is obviously the english and not the german name of the language. But "Wie steht es um Ihr Griechisch?" wouldn't be grammatically correct either.
FYI greek has a good introductory course by Language Transfer, from which you can graduate to textbooks (available from rutracker) and ChatGPT for practice and OCR. I also maintained decent retention by converting everything I learned into Anki cards. Living in a greek-speaking country helps, but only when you are forced to communicate in EL or when you explicitly ingest new words/phrases from what you read around. Before that, I used Duolingo for the same purpose, had issues keeping the streak up and understanding the material (this was early ChatGPT era, though).
It gave me a very wrong intro starting lesson number after saying I was second from the most advanced level and answering 26/26 of the intro questions correctly. It was showing me things like what does the 1st most common verb mean, etc. Just FYI.
Seems like false advertisement
> Over 700 hand-selected courses created by native speakers and linguists.
when it's pure AI with a lot of mistakes (at least couple examples I did).
Gave it a try for a language I know (Spanish) and one I don't (Russian).
On Russian, the explanations of why some answers were correct/incorrect didn't load (presumably an AI call failed?). Especially at lower layers, a good fallback would be a simple dictionary definition.
On Spanish, I did the placement test, then it asked which "dialect" I wanted. I selected Mexican, and was treated with truly excellent renderings of European pronunciation. I wouldn't have been mad if all it had was one set of pronunciation, and it's more frustrating to see the ignored option than to never have it at all.
As for the placement test: I got dropped into lesson 2 for Spanish. For comparison, I placed into Lesson 5 in Russian, where I actually got more incorrect answers. The Spanish placement test wasn't very deep, and I knew all the answers. It told me I got two wrong, so either the test is wrong or I just got punchy and hit the wrong buttons.
Recommendation: scale back on the ambition. Focus on getting the educational and product experience right with languages you know first. Be honest about data provenance and limitations.
A bit off-topic, but it's interesting how the first thing I check now is whether this is a vibe coded app (which it seems to be) or something that had serious effort put into it.
I mean, "effort" to me in this context is what the creator of $project thinks it is worth their time. Don't you agree? If you want to learn a new computer language yourself, vibecoding will probably not help you. If you want to create something to scratch your itch, and spend time and mental effort in getting it polished, isn't that effort? It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.
I think your last point is the important one. I don't mind vibe coded app if they are polished. But a polished vibe coded app looks like a non-vibe-coded app because of the polishing. The polishing is 95% of the effort. This app here looks fully vibe coded, without much polishing, at least to me.
> It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.
This feels like a vibecoded comment.
To address the "substance" of your "comment": yes, creating a polished product requires effort, but this is not a polished product: as pointed out by numerous commenters, it provides nothing new, and what it does provide is broken. Thus the GP's comment that it is vibecoded slop and not worth taking seriously.
My rhetorical question was broader, because GP comment was a generic one, not specific to this project.
I would ask you to be more mindful in your replies.
It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.
> I would ask you to be more mindful in your replies.
You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
> It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.
And the whole point of my initial reply was to question the definition of "effort".
> You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
I think your reply perfectly illustrates the situation.
Not a fruitful discussion anyway, enjoy clicking down arrows.
You're offering a product, not a vibe project, so I disagree.
If vibe coding would lower cost while maintaining quality then this would be a fair argument, but the reality is that its a lazy way and frankly it's not programming.
GP was speaking of the first thing they now check on every new project they find is whether it's vibecoded or there is actual "effort" in it. Hence my comment.
From the title it seems you are not a fan of Duolingo, which is fair. However the app lessons seem very similar to Duolingo. It even seems you copied "hearts" and "gems" and "streaks" from Duolingo.
Some questions:
"Listen to authentic native pronunciation in every lesson. Learn the correct accent and intonation from day one."
Can you elaborate on what this means? I currently speak Portuguese (Brazilian) and Italian. While the Italian audio seems fine, the Brazilian portuguese audio is not very good. It seems to be using Portugal's portuguese. And it doesn't sound "native". The audio for single words specially is not something I would recommend to anyone learning portuguese.
The landing page also makes these marketing claims but doesn't go further into any of them:
- "Our proven algorithm tracks every word you learn". Do you follow any learning methodology? What has been "proven" about your algorithm? Are their some stats?
- "Engage in dynamic lessons designed by language specialists." Who are you language specialists that have "carefully designed lessons"?
The one thing you have going for you is that I didn't have to give you my email to get started but the landing page doesn't give me any confidence that this app is better than Duolingo or other language apps.
I was impressed to see Irish was included, but it soon became clear it's all LLM generated. That's not enough to write it off on its own (ChatGPT can be surprisingly good when explaining Irish sentences) but I spotted so many mistakes in the demo questions alone I can't imagine this is going to help anyone learn anything.
I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.
1. I selected "advanced level" for my target language. I expected real sentence. Instead I got a lot of "I am American" and "He is tall" type sentences.
2. In some cases when I was asked to select the word to complete the sentence, multiple options could be correct, but only one was recognized as correct by the program. Concretely, the format was "He is ______" and the possible solutions were "that" "Indian" "American" "comes from" and "French". Three of those options are perfectly grammatical, but only "French" was marked correct.
3. No offense, but this all has the hallmarks of AI slop, which I consider to not be an appropriate way to develop language learning tools, especially at an above-beginner level. Each language has different structures and complications and requires attention to different aspects of the language.
4. Above all, this app does not appear to differ from Duolingo in any substantial way, except that it's worse. If you're going to boast that your app is better than Duolingo, you should substantiate that with a concrete argument. Certainly Duolingo is highly flawed, above all in its total absence of formal grammar instruction which is something that even an AI-generated app should be able to do.
I like the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm struggling to see the differentiator between this and duolingo. The Dutch lesson that I did seemed to be pretty identical to dutch lesson in duolingo.
It doesn't seem to have any theme for each lessons either, which is my major bugbear about the new duolingo. (its really obvious in the more well loved languages like spanish)
Something strange I noticed with the Malayalam course (maybe also other languages with a non-Latin script): when a word is shown, two Latin transliterations are shown underneath. The second one looks like an IAST or ISO-15919 transliteration. The first one is often wrong and sometimes even nonsensical. Why not have only the second transliteration?
I don't even need to open the project to know this is vibe coded garbage. This is in no way a personal attack, but the writing style is 100% AI fueled. There's no personality and frankly its too generic to be considered truthful.
The problem is there, but a tool is just not the solution. The solution is to actually put in the elbow grease and learn what you need/want to learn.
Apps need to be dopamine fueled to work, and no one has fixed this problem yet.
The Ghibli generated character and logo makes me feel like this is a vibe coded project. I know Duolingo has become more ai-first, but at least they put some effort into the branding and styling of the content.
Presumably if one uses a styled "language-learning app" and are shown testimonals saying something like "I used X and learned language Y" then they are using the app with the goal of learning the language.
Also the poster was clearing trying to say "If that is there goal, they are wasting their time." Why misconstrue them so heavily?
When I loaded the page I saw a bunch of placeholder text like "Hero title" for a second then an AI-generated image was the first thing I saw after that. Doesn't inspire confidence that it's "expert crafted."
70+ languages and 700+ courses would imply a staff of people were required to create something like this (if it's of any quality), but it's a "side project"?
Hi "Tim", are you aware that this is fraud? That this app doesn't help anyone?
How do you prevent gullible users from wasting their time and money on the app rather than learning languages?
From your testimonial that you learned Turkish do you at all mean to imply that a user of your app will have a higher chance of learning Turkish than if they didn't use the app vs say a conversation partner?
Why sell an ineffective product when a more effective one is free?
To quote you "I'm not going to pretend this replaces living in a country or having a conversation partner."
This sounds like you believe a simple telephone call is superior to your app. If so why create it? Did you consciously decide to pray on socially anxious people or are you just following other apps blindly?
The lessons are questionable. I did the Japanese one, and despite answering all of the incredibly easy questions perfectly, it dumped me into lesson 6, which is also incredibly easy and was the same thing I'd already answered correctly.
Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.) As a long-time Japanese learner I knew which to expect would be expected as the answer, but a novice would not and it would be just frustrating.
Another was a whole question spoken out loud, but just 1 word from the question as an answer. It can be used like that, but it's asking a lot for a learner to get through it. It's like asking, "Okay?" when you mean "Are you okay?" and expecting a learner to figure it out.
I'm not really sure who this is for. It doesn't seem to fit well for beginner, intermediate, or advanced learners. Beginners need more basic info and explanation. Intermediates probably need things that are more topical. Advanced users probably need things that are more... Well, advanced.
It absolutely is. I don't understand how people are so delusional to think that their AI slop has any value.
If I were fine with AI, I could just prompt the LLM myself to create a course perfectly catered to me. Why would I need you? Because your prompting skills are magic? Yeah, no. That is like charging for google search results because you searching skills are so great.
The whole problem with Duolingo is that it got so much worse once they started using AI. Switching to another AI driven project would be out of the frying pan into the fire.
Għadni kemm bdejt nitgħallem il-Malti! I'm using my own app, and I don't want to link it here given it's someone else's launch post, but you can find many links in my profile. But if you're a self-directed type of learner, I've been making sure it works well with Maltese :)
Please get in touch if you have any questions! The setup process is hit and miss, but there's a telegram community for members with many happy customers. I'm there all the time and we're all happy to help!
Plus it would be awesome to get more Maltese learners. I have no one to gush about this language with :D
Not yet! I speak some Italian and want to learn Arabic. I found out there was a semitic language with Italian vocabulary in the latin script and that's what started my obsession.
Actually to be completely honest, I learned about Maltese, checked my app, and saw it supported Maltese. That night I was learning a language with an app I'd previously built without even knowing the language existed. That's what started my obsession with it.
Then turns out it's an island in an awesome location with an even cooler history. And it uses the letter Ħ
I've been working on a similar app called Trakaido. (Yes, it's also AI generated content).
The demo leans heavily on "choose the words for the sentence", which avoids spelling/keyboard issues, and maybe generalizes around the problems of N->N language maps better. The "decoy selection" for multiple choice answers also isn't great - I am getting sentences mixed with numbers for the translation of "three".
It also has the Duolingo-esque audio "reward" sounds. I personally hate them, but a lot of people feel otherwise.
It's always a good initiative to build something on your own.
Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users.
Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts.
I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language. The very first items were:
1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better)
2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour
Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting Guten Morgen is wrong, correcting me to Hallo. Then it asked me what Bonjour means again, this time Guten Morgen is correct.
So yeah, good initiative, but please just tell me what it is and don't lie.
The issue here is a simple bug. We have two pairs for that specific lesson: - Hello <-> Bonjour - Good morning <-> Bonjour
They are identified by the question's id. And by the id we find the answer, and this is a bug where we show you one of the Bonjours, and only one of the answers is right per id. It's just a bug, that we already have mechanics for, but it's not always perfect. The course is still tested by linguists and native speakers.
Hey dear neighbor :3
I'm no German speaker, but I'm French, and without invalidating your initial claim (about the AI generated stuff), in France we do translate "good morning" by "Bonjour", which literally means good (bon) day (jour).
Any other translation would be weird: if you'd translate "good morning" by "Bonne journée" -> that would be super weird, because this is something one could say in France to say "Goodbye" xD
I lived in Germany for a short time back in 2022, and notice that saying "Hallo" is used a little bit everywhere. However I can tell you that you are NOT supposed to say "salut" in France ANYWHERE except with your friends.
Like, imagine, you're in Germany you enter a bakery, you can say "Hallo" -> no problem. Same situation in France and you say "Salut" -> either people will react badly or assume that you don't know French or maybe they'll think you're impolite for no reasons
Agreed - the landing page specifically claims “Over 700 expert-crafted courses for any language pair imaginable.”
I’m a trust-but-verify kind of person, and I can’t find a single mention of any language-learning facilities, academies, linguists, native speakers, or anything else that would corroborate this.
In other words, the system is designed so that any learning the speaker attempts somehow ends up being scored wrong, forcing the speaker to conclude they will always be identified by the system as an error-prone, non-native speaker yearning for acceptance by ears trained from childhood to hear cracks in any facade the speaker slaps together, forever and ever...
Sounds like the author unwittingly taught you the first lesson. :)
Edit: clarification
I watched the demo. It looks like a clone of duolingo. Can you do a better job of explaining how this is different? What features does it have that duo doesn't. How does the app push you to those features vs just falling into the same pattern as duo?
You say you learned Turkish with lairner. What level of fluency did you achieve? Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension?
Edit: I'm not trying to be argumentative, I see a lot of people come on Show HN with these fantastic projects but are poorly marketed. You seem to have some differentiator but I'm not seeing it in action. I wish you the best success with this, and I can assure you, if it's as good as you say I will be your biggest customer and fan.
> Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension?
Only a very small percentage of people that learn a language that is not their native language can achieve that.
???? that is called fluency
Not really. Fluency is probably closer to 70-95% comprehension, combined with an ability to assume the rest. I assume the comment is talking about native level comprehension, which is still only like 99.99%
Source: native English speaker in Europe. I have to explain/reword several words/expressions per day to people who would be by all means considered fluent.
(all numbers in this comment were estimated based on experience)
I wouldn't consider anyone "fluent" who has only 70% comprehension. More like 90%+. If you're assuming things based on context that is a marker of a low level of comprehension.
Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.
I would say "full comprehension" would mean you don't need words and phrases explained to you on a daily basis.
And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%.
Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension.
I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency".
Have you ever learned a language? Because that's what it is for a very large percentage of people.
Nonsense, that's called 'learning a language' and is done by many who move abroad. I'm Dutch but more or less fluent in English and Swedish, can come quite far in German and make myself understood in and understand French. I'd have to learn local idioms in any of those countries, including the Netherlands since some expressions are really local and don't see much of any use outside of the village or county.
> I learned Turkish with lairner itself
Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?
> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.
I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?
Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.
This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...
Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.
I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)
This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.
I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.
So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)
Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!
>How can you go to <INSERT_PLACE> if you haven't been there before.
If the point of learning a language was to say new words to yourself, you can just make up words.
If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.
I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.
All of those stories are cool, I enjoyed reading them.
However, the app exists ... and it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I gave a go with a less popular language. This is a clone of Duolingo from the first glance, and does not place you into a correct level after examination.
Funny vibe code glitche in how an excersirce gives away the answer in a transaction of each question.
Here to answer some of these questions: We offer a huge part of our corpus for free, and we offer a super cheap Premium offer in order to still make some money. We use linguists, teachers, and native speakers to curate our courses, but we're a small team of three people who just started this a few months ago, not all of our content is yet verified and corrected. We're working together with 2 institutions for endangered languages, offer them a "cms"-like interface to host their own courses alongside our existing courses. Yes, there are bugs. Yes, placements aren't great. But we're working on it! Goal is: Combinations. Make it possible to learn French from Arabic. Make it possible to learn Igbo from German. And so on. There's no fraud involved (how even do you imagine anything fraudulent here, it's a language learning app with a massive free tier), we're just trying to make it accessible.
Thanks for all the feedback, this filled up our backlog for surely a few weeks.
As an learning (and conversational) Khmer speaker, I tried the Khmer module.
It's an absolute disaster in both romanization of Khmer characters and pronounciation. Simple words like 'arkun' are pronounced _very_ incorrectly and the romanization is incomprehensible.
Tried this with german as native language and greek as language I want to learn.
First question: Wie steht es um Ihr Greek?
Greek is obviously the english and not the german name of the language. But "Wie steht es um Ihr Griechisch?" wouldn't be grammatically correct either.
FYI greek has a good introductory course by Language Transfer, from which you can graduate to textbooks (available from rutracker) and ChatGPT for practice and OCR. I also maintained decent retention by converting everything I learned into Anki cards. Living in a greek-speaking country helps, but only when you are forced to communicate in EL or when you explicitly ingest new words/phrases from what you read around. Before that, I used Duolingo for the same purpose, had issues keeping the streak up and understanding the material (this was early ChatGPT era, though).
It gave me a very wrong intro starting lesson number after saying I was second from the most advanced level and answering 26/26 of the intro questions correctly. It was showing me things like what does the 1st most common verb mean, etc. Just FYI.
Seems like false advertisement > Over 700 hand-selected courses created by native speakers and linguists. when it's pure AI with a lot of mistakes (at least couple examples I did).
I guess that's what an AI would have said.
Gave it a try for a language I know (Spanish) and one I don't (Russian).
On Russian, the explanations of why some answers were correct/incorrect didn't load (presumably an AI call failed?). Especially at lower layers, a good fallback would be a simple dictionary definition.
On Spanish, I did the placement test, then it asked which "dialect" I wanted. I selected Mexican, and was treated with truly excellent renderings of European pronunciation. I wouldn't have been mad if all it had was one set of pronunciation, and it's more frustrating to see the ignored option than to never have it at all.
As for the placement test: I got dropped into lesson 2 for Spanish. For comparison, I placed into Lesson 5 in Russian, where I actually got more incorrect answers. The Spanish placement test wasn't very deep, and I knew all the answers. It told me I got two wrong, so either the test is wrong or I just got punchy and hit the wrong buttons.
Recommendation: scale back on the ambition. Focus on getting the educational and product experience right with languages you know first. Be honest about data provenance and limitations.
> But I wanted something that at least tries to teach you the language instead of teaching you to play a language-themed game.
I'm interested. What's the fundamental difference here, that actually pushes you to learn the language in a useful way?
A bit off-topic, but it's interesting how the first thing I check now is whether this is a vibe coded app (which it seems to be) or something that had serious effort put into it.
Define "effort".
I mean, "effort" to me in this context is what the creator of $project thinks it is worth their time. Don't you agree? If you want to learn a new computer language yourself, vibecoding will probably not help you. If you want to create something to scratch your itch, and spend time and mental effort in getting it polished, isn't that effort? It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.
I think your last point is the important one. I don't mind vibe coded app if they are polished. But a polished vibe coded app looks like a non-vibe-coded app because of the polishing. The polishing is 95% of the effort. This app here looks fully vibe coded, without much polishing, at least to me.
> It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.
This feels like a vibecoded comment.
To address the "substance" of your "comment": yes, creating a polished product requires effort, but this is not a polished product: as pointed out by numerous commenters, it provides nothing new, and what it does provide is broken. Thus the GP's comment that it is vibecoded slop and not worth taking seriously.
My rhetorical question was broader, because GP comment was a generic one, not specific to this project. I would ask you to be more mindful in your replies.
> My rhetorical question was broader,
It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.
> I would ask you to be more mindful in your replies.
You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
> It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.
And the whole point of my initial reply was to question the definition of "effort".
> You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
I think your reply perfectly illustrates the situation.
Not a fruitful discussion anyway, enjoy clicking down arrows.
You're offering a product, not a vibe project, so I disagree.
If vibe coding would lower cost while maintaining quality then this would be a fair argument, but the reality is that its a lazy way and frankly it's not programming.
GP was speaking of the first thing they now check on every new project they find is whether it's vibecoded or there is actual "effort" in it. Hence my comment.
From the title it seems you are not a fan of Duolingo, which is fair. However the app lessons seem very similar to Duolingo. It even seems you copied "hearts" and "gems" and "streaks" from Duolingo.
Some questions:
"Listen to authentic native pronunciation in every lesson. Learn the correct accent and intonation from day one."
Can you elaborate on what this means? I currently speak Portuguese (Brazilian) and Italian. While the Italian audio seems fine, the Brazilian portuguese audio is not very good. It seems to be using Portugal's portuguese. And it doesn't sound "native". The audio for single words specially is not something I would recommend to anyone learning portuguese.
The landing page also makes these marketing claims but doesn't go further into any of them:
- "Our proven algorithm tracks every word you learn". Do you follow any learning methodology? What has been "proven" about your algorithm? Are their some stats?
- "Engage in dynamic lessons designed by language specialists." Who are you language specialists that have "carefully designed lessons"?
The one thing you have going for you is that I didn't have to give you my email to get started but the landing page doesn't give me any confidence that this app is better than Duolingo or other language apps.
I was impressed to see Irish was included, but it soon became clear it's all LLM generated. That's not enough to write it off on its own (ChatGPT can be surprisingly good when explaining Irish sentences) but I spotted so many mistakes in the demo questions alone I can't imagine this is going to help anyone learn anything.
I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.
A couple points based on 10 minutes of trying:
1. I selected "advanced level" for my target language. I expected real sentence. Instead I got a lot of "I am American" and "He is tall" type sentences.
2. In some cases when I was asked to select the word to complete the sentence, multiple options could be correct, but only one was recognized as correct by the program. Concretely, the format was "He is ______" and the possible solutions were "that" "Indian" "American" "comes from" and "French". Three of those options are perfectly grammatical, but only "French" was marked correct.
3. No offense, but this all has the hallmarks of AI slop, which I consider to not be an appropriate way to develop language learning tools, especially at an above-beginner level. Each language has different structures and complications and requires attention to different aspects of the language.
4. Above all, this app does not appear to differ from Duolingo in any substantial way, except that it's worse. If you're going to boast that your app is better than Duolingo, you should substantiate that with a concrete argument. Certainly Duolingo is highly flawed, above all in its total absence of formal grammar instruction which is something that even an AI-generated app should be able to do.
I like the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm struggling to see the differentiator between this and duolingo. The Dutch lesson that I did seemed to be pretty identical to dutch lesson in duolingo.
It doesn't seem to have any theme for each lessons either, which is my major bugbear about the new duolingo. (its really obvious in the more well loved languages like spanish)
This seems unlikely to teach anyone to speak a language. The gold standard is comprehensible input. This just looks like a Duolingo clone.
Something strange I noticed with the Malayalam course (maybe also other languages with a non-Latin script): when a word is shown, two Latin transliterations are shown underneath. The second one looks like an IAST or ISO-15919 transliteration. The first one is often wrong and sometimes even nonsensical. Why not have only the second transliteration?
Just wanted to let you know that some pronunciation audio in Japanese are completely wrong.
I don't even need to open the project to know this is vibe coded garbage. This is in no way a personal attack, but the writing style is 100% AI fueled. There's no personality and frankly its too generic to be considered truthful.
The problem is there, but a tool is just not the solution. The solution is to actually put in the elbow grease and learn what you need/want to learn.
Apps need to be dopamine fueled to work, and no one has fixed this problem yet.
I tried the chinese one. The tone for 十一 is wrong. It should be shi2 yi1. But the audio says shi4 yi1. So seems bad quality
The Ghibli generated character and logo makes me feel like this is a vibe coded project. I know Duolingo has become more ai-first, but at least they put some effort into the branding and styling of the content.
> It is surprising how many waste time on Duolingo.
It's not a waste of time if one enjoys it. Not everyone has the same goals, and Duolingo proves that a great many people enjoy their model.
actually something can be a waste of time if one enjoys it, see: heroin, or any other addictive substances
Presumably if one uses a styled "language-learning app" and are shown testimonals saying something like "I used X and learned language Y" then they are using the app with the goal of learning the language.
Also the poster was clearing trying to say "If that is there goal, they are wasting their time." Why misconstrue them so heavily?
What is different about how your app teaches language?
When I loaded the page I saw a bunch of placeholder text like "Hero title" for a second then an AI-generated image was the first thing I saw after that. Doesn't inspire confidence that it's "expert crafted."
70+ languages and 700+ courses would imply a staff of people were required to create something like this (if it's of any quality), but it's a "side project"?
Strains credulity.
Hi "Tim", are you aware that this is fraud? That this app doesn't help anyone?
How do you prevent gullible users from wasting their time and money on the app rather than learning languages?
From your testimonial that you learned Turkish do you at all mean to imply that a user of your app will have a higher chance of learning Turkish than if they didn't use the app vs say a conversation partner?
Why sell an ineffective product when a more effective one is free?
To quote you "I'm not going to pretend this replaces living in a country or having a conversation partner." This sounds like you believe a simple telephone call is superior to your app. If so why create it? Did you consciously decide to pray on socially anxious people or are you just following other apps blindly?
You can use it for free. It's not fraud.
70 languages from one guy? Was this vibe-coded?
The lessons are questionable. I did the Japanese one, and despite answering all of the incredibly easy questions perfectly, it dumped me into lesson 6, which is also incredibly easy and was the same thing I'd already answered correctly.
Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.) As a long-time Japanese learner I knew which to expect would be expected as the answer, but a novice would not and it would be just frustrating.
Another was a whole question spoken out loud, but just 1 word from the question as an answer. It can be used like that, but it's asking a lot for a learner to get through it. It's like asking, "Okay?" when you mean "Are you okay?" and expecting a learner to figure it out.
I'm not really sure who this is for. It doesn't seem to fit well for beginner, intermediate, or advanced learners. Beginners need more basic info and explanation. Intermediates probably need things that are more topical. Advanced users probably need things that are more... Well, advanced.
the character looks ai generated, doesn't inspire confidence
I built an app that offers 90-ish languages, and it is not vibe coded. I mean it's taken me over 10,000 hours, but it is possible :)
Almost certainly, but that’s no reason to immediately discount it.
Actually, it kinda is? Who's verifying that all the lessons are teaching actually correct info, instead of bullshit?
I'm less worried about the "vibe coded" than "vibe-language-learning"
Though I do think there is vast potential for such things, it needs to be approached judiciously.
From trying it out, it's definitely vibe created because both the pronunciation and wording it provides in a language I know are wrong.
Duolingo (at least for the same language) has correct pronunciation and grammar/words, even if it's not a good way to learn.
It's vibe coded because every button looks different.
It absolutely is. I don't understand how people are so delusional to think that their AI slop has any value.
If I were fine with AI, I could just prompt the LLM myself to create a course perfectly catered to me. Why would I need you? Because your prompting skills are magic? Yeah, no. That is like charging for google search results because you searching skills are so great.
The whole problem with Duolingo is that it got so much worse once they started using AI. Switching to another AI driven project would be out of the frying pan into the fire.
Yes, it is an excellent reason to discard it as a slop.
Any chance you’ll add Maltese?
Għadni kemm bdejt nitgħallem il-Malti! I'm using my own app, and I don't want to link it here given it's someone else's launch post, but you can find many links in my profile. But if you're a self-directed type of learner, I've been making sure it works well with Maltese :)
Dak hu tajjeb ħafna! Se nagħti ħarsa. Jien ukoll għadni kif bdejt u eċċitat ħafna.
Please get in touch if you have any questions! The setup process is hit and miss, but there's a telegram community for members with many happy customers. I'm there all the time and we're all happy to help!
Plus it would be awesome to get more Maltese learners. I have no one to gush about this language with :D
Can't wait to try it out.
Have you been to Malta?
Not yet! I speak some Italian and want to learn Arabic. I found out there was a semitic language with Italian vocabulary in the latin script and that's what started my obsession.
Actually to be completely honest, I learned about Maltese, checked my app, and saw it supported Maltese. That night I was learning a language with an app I'd previously built without even knowing the language existed. That's what started my obsession with it.
Then turns out it's an island in an awesome location with an even cooler history. And it uses the letter Ħ
What made you start learning Maltese?
We definitely plan on adding it very soon.
I've been working on a similar app called Trakaido. (Yes, it's also AI generated content).
The demo leans heavily on "choose the words for the sentence", which avoids spelling/keyboard issues, and maybe generalizes around the problems of N->N language maps better. The "decoy selection" for multiple choice answers also isn't great - I am getting sentences mixed with numbers for the translation of "three".
It also has the Duolingo-esque audio "reward" sounds. I personally hate them, but a lot of people feel otherwise.
This looks nice, but there are so many of these "best way to learn a language" sites/apps these days, I don't even know what to think of that anymore.