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Building an app to learn languages with short stories

by fersarr on 10/10/23, 12:45 PM with 57 comments

• by probably_wrong on 10/10/23, 5:00 PM

  I picked a random story in Spanish [1], which is my native language.

  First, and maybe up for discussion, "gnocchi" in spanish is written "ñoqui". See [2] for a commercial example or check the story's title.

  Second, the sentence "Después de aprender a hacer gnocchis con su abuela, Hendrik nunca le gusta los gnocchis de nadie más" is wrong: the part after the comma should read "a Hendrik nunca le gustaron los ñoquis de nadie más". I'm also unhappy with "Siempre dice que faltaba algo" as it makes a funny mix of present and past tenses.

  Third, I think the last paragraph is incoherent as Hendrik learns the nutmeg trick twice (learns from grandma about nutmeg -> finds other gnocchis lacking -> learns about nutmeg).

  The well-known LLMs are surprisingly bad in languages that are not English. I'm not sure I would trust them just yet.

  [1] https://webbu.app/l/spanish/story/los-%C3%B1oquis-de-la-abue...

  [2] https://www.pastasgallo.es/productos/noquis-de-patata-seca/

• by modo_ on 10/10/23, 2:50 PM

  This is really great. Congrats on shipping it! You might find https://www.lingq.com helpful as a source of inspiration. I think it's a fairly similar concept.

  LingQ's killer feature for me is that as you click on words (or phrases - which I find really helpful btw) to translate them, they are added to your vocabulary list. It will automatically create flashcards for you from this list for SRS. Plus when you're reading a new story, words that are in your vocab list are highlighted yellow and new words are highlighted blue.

• by SamBam on 10/10/23, 3:22 PM

  This sounds great. I could imagine it takes inspiration from (or could take inspiration from) programs like Dreaming Spanish, a series of videos that are ranked at different levels of Spanish. The philosophy behind the programs is that what is most important is the active consumption of another language, like by listening and trying to understand. That actually our intuition that we need to work on generating the foreign language, by speaking or writing it, hasn't necessarily been shown by research. Instead, actively consuming another language at a level at or very slightly above your current level is perhaps the best way to become fluent at that language.

  In terms of the content that you're creating, I always thought it would be very interesting to have leveled plays written in the target language. I always thought that reading how people actually speak might be more useful than reading prose.

• by Two9A on 10/10/23, 1:33 PM

  Quick note: your article links to webbu.app but the link text is "webu.app"; that was awfully confusing.

  Might be worth a pass through to proof-read; I saw another couple of typos, but the page is now throwing a Wordpress database error, so that might be more urgent to look at.

• by zeta0134 on 10/10/23, 2:27 PM

  I'd be happy to pay for such a service if the stories were written by a human, but once I learned the stories are AI generated, I bounced. Even if they're edited by a native speaker, something about that feels off. I want to learn from other humans, not from a language model.

• by emursebrian on 10/10/23, 3:05 PM

  I think this is a great idea! I am also working on an app and we've just added a similar feature.

  It's illustration heavy picture book with multiple difficulty levels and recordings by native speakers for each line of text. The goal is for students to be able to learn languages while they read. Ideally, without having to translate words - though we do provide a lookup tool. Each line in the story is read by a native speaker, and the reader has the option to record themselves and play it back to check their pronunciation.

  Our first story "Ari & Chali go to the Market" teaches Thai classifiers and is perfect for someone who has completed Reading Thai Made easy or is just learning how to read.

  We hope to develop more content like this for Thai, as well as other languages.

  Reading Thai Made Easy: https://emurse.io/course/TdXFGTB/lessons Ari & Chali go to the Market: https://emurse.io/presentation/BnkcnXB

• by technotarek on 10/10/23, 4:00 PM

  As a French language learner, one thing I’d love to see is more interesting ways of practicing a specific area/skill (eg in French that might be the passé composé or l’imparfait). There are tons of lessons on line, but they’re boring and uninteresting. They don’t motivate you like a short story or short film where you get both practice and pleasure. It seems very doable to use LLM technologies to transform a given short story to focus on specific language skills (eg rewrite to utilize mostly a specific tense). I know it’s possible because one of my first play experiments with ChatGPT was to have it write a letter to Santa using only specific tenses. In the end you get to reinforce your comprehension and recognition of specific facets of a language. I wish this was more widely available in language learning offerings Hint, hint Duolingo, please consider allowing me to choose the skill I want to learn at a given time, at least in some way. This might apply more to intermediate and advanced learners.

• by bluGill on 10/10/23, 2:34 PM

  The hard part of this is finding stories you want to read. Looks cool, but The one story i read was maybe 5 minutes. To make progress you need an hour or more per day. Well you can make progress on 5 minutes per day, but 500-1000 hours is what it takes to be useful and so 5 minutes a day just doesn't add up fast enough.

• by steveridout on 10/10/23, 4:58 PM

  Nice start! I love the idea of an AI assisted learning experience structured around stories.

  I make a tool in the same space (readlang.com). I started it before the current LLM wave but I've recently added LLM-generated explanations and several users have been uploading LLM generated texts to read (including me!). I've been considering adding LLM based practice too, similar to what you've done with the comprehension questions, but haven't got around to that yet.

  Feel free to reach out if you'd like a chat :-)

• by dang on 10/10/23, 7:11 PM

  It looks like great stuff but I've taken Show HN out of the title because (1) blog posts can't be Show HNs - please see the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html; and

  (2) it had a Show HN a few months ago:

  Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713852 - April 2023 (119 comments)

• by greybox on 10/10/23, 2:28 PM

  I'm learning Japanese and something like this would be beneficial.

  > You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation.

  This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too.

  That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any text really. (you can use calibre to convert into and between most ebook formats)

  I look forward to seeing where this goes! I imagine the really difficulty will be applying it to more than just German. Especially when you branch outside of indoeuropean languages

• by kebsup on 10/10/23, 4:35 PM

  Warning: shameless self-promotion

  I'm currently working on German vocabulary learning app, https://vokabeln.io/, which uses LLMs in a similar way. The app allows you to paste text and extracts the vocabulary to learn. The vocabulary is then repeated with spaced repetition, audios are generated and users can generate infinitely more examples.

  I might have made something that works only for me, as getting users seems to be extremely difficult, but I enjoy it much more than anything else I've tried.

• by poulpy123 on 10/10/23, 2:28 PM

  Interesting, what are the diference with learning with text ? https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/

• by istjohn on 10/10/23, 3:57 PM

  I can't wait to get access to ChatGPT with voice so I can practice my Spanish. I suspect that the utility of vanilla ChatGPT for language learning will soon obviate the need for any custom apps.

• by torquan on 10/11/23, 5:34 AM

  Not a fan of using an AI voice for language learned. The melody and rhythm is off. If you're learning a language, hearing native speakers is important.

• by dsizzle on 10/10/23, 4:21 PM

  The title has a typo: "l earn" vs "learn"

• by bavarianbob on 10/10/23, 2:57 PM

  This is wonderful! I'm building something similar for Italian and I love how you have thought through this problem. Kudos for shipping!

• by wintorez on 10/10/23, 2:06 PM

  Thank you, I was looking for something like this for my Spanish