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Show HN: Text editor with inline English-German dictionary

by ichverstehe on 11/17/22, 12:05 PM with 16 comments

Hi

When you are learning a new language, you need to practice different skills: reading, listening, speaking, writing. I find writing to be the hardest activity, not least because I have to look up words in the dictionary all the time, and that is a frustrating context switch.

Here is an experimental CodeMirror-based editor, that lets you look up translations inline. Type @ followed by the English word, and get a list of possible translations, and select the translation to apply it.

Online demo: https://foreign-dispatch-autocomplete.netlify.app/

  • by 97-109-107 on 11/18/22, 2:05 PM

    This is very clever, I haven't seen such modal conventions for translation/substitution.

    I think it's quite original to have the starting point of "I'm almost good enough to write on my own" in stead of starting in the usual spot of full-auto translation pipe dream.

    I occasionally use deepl to write messages in languages which I'm rusty, but the-back-and-forth between editing my final output and selecting suggestions in not smooth.

  • by divyenduz on 11/19/22, 9:17 AM

    This is very nice, I wrote something very similar for telegram, I don't maintain it anymore, love to see tools like this

    - https://github.com/divyenduz/languagelearners - https://languagelearners.vercel.app/

  • by juujian on 11/18/22, 9:46 PM

    Love that. I assume for learners an alternative mode would be great where it shows you the word but you still have to type it, just to build muscle memory.

  • by smcin on 11/18/22, 11:53 PM

    Neat! Two issues I found:

    1) if I type @being I get zero options, even though it's in the dict https://www.wikdict.com/de-en/being . I only get options for expanding @be

    2) I can't expand @be/being into a noun ('Beings surrounded our ship'), only into a verb/gerund ('Being John Malkovich')

  • by gumby on 11/18/22, 10:05 PM

    Makes me wonder if you could reasonably write an LSP server for text and then plug it into your editor for on-the-fly autocomplete, translations etc?

  • by vacooom on 11/19/22, 7:35 AM

    That's a neat idea. Would love to have that as an Obsidian plugin!

  • by wklm on 11/18/22, 9:55 PM

    great stuff, would love to have it as an outlook plugin

  • by agolio on 11/18/22, 9:56 PM

    Super cool project!! I can really imagine this being helpful,

    I love alternative language learning tools, also keen on for e.g., Language Learning with Netflix which lets you see dual subtitles while watching netflix.

    I will drop my own (very naive, possibly incorrect) side project that I made while learning German myself, always happy for feedback! agol.io/trainer