I think the value from Langliter comes from two areas:
1. The NLP processing and tooling built on top of that processing 2. Its superior mobile experience
If I just used a simple form of tokenization, I think I could very quickly deliver a superior mobile experience than what is currently available from similar apps. However, I'm not sure if PoS tagging and some of the other techniques I'm using translate to those languages or if they do, how much value they'd add to the learning process.
But it's something I'll certainly revisit if the app ends up being popular and I have the resources to do it properly.
What about support of non-latin alphabet languages? I'm learning Dari at the moment. It uses Arabic alphabets, the words are a string of alphabets, there is tenses, verbs, nouns, adjectives. It's different to English only by the alphabet used, the vocabulary and the ordering of the verbs/nouns/subject.
Is it possible for it to be opened up to third parties to contribute new languages?
And of course there are the Universal POS tags, although I'm not sure if they are precise enough for your intended purpose.
As someone living in Indonesia for about two years who has tried other apps, buying grade school books, nothing is interesting to me once the novelty wears off, and my incentives for learning more than navigational stuff and greetings is pretty much nil.
Do you choose articles, then run nlp over them? How do you get dictionary results?
I really like being able to quickly and easily tag words for learning. Thanks. I'm a polyglot and completely relate to the premise of your app and system.
I used the iOS version but an curious, are these native? React Native?
For me the real deal is in the memorize function that gives you a word plus a sentence coming from your collection of text to get some context. You get the same word-by-word translation on the sentence, you can play it out, you are not only working on your words but discovering new words from the sentences and improving your listening comprehension.
I'm looking to support German the first half of this year. It's currently number 2 or 3 on my new language priority list. If you'd like to get an email when it's available, there is a form at the bottom of the homepage that let's you fill out what language pairs you're interested in.
Looks like a great app; while I'm learning german I will definitely sign up when it becomes available.
Learning Chinese has a lot more initial barriers, which I explain more in this blog post:
So to do that properly, I would need to learn a bit more about Chinese to understand how it would fit. Your docs do a good job explaining the problems you're solving, but since I lack even a cursory understanding of the Chinese writing system, I have a hard time following it all.
Impressive app btw, I clicked the "Advanced" button and can see there's a lot of functionality there.
That said, congrats for the good work! I really like the idea, and I feel this problem very much. Currently picking up Swedish, and unable to find easy enough news worth reading every day, so I'm a bit stuck at that level "able to understand a bit but not enough to read everything".
Do you happen to have a roadmap about the addition of new languages? If Swedish was there I would totally go Pro.
What resources have you been using? Klartext is a service that delivers news in accessible Swedish (sort of like simple English Wikipedia) along with pronounciations that I’ve found to be very useful - sverigesradio.se/klartext
I’ve also changed my phone’s native language to Swedish and I’ve been watching English Netflix shows with subtitles which has really helped with picking up new words. I’m also using the SVT Play app to watch Swedish language programs with Swedish subtitles to develop oral comprehension and improve pronunciation.
There’s probably no substitute for total immersion but since I don’t plan on moving to Sweden anytime soon I’ve found the above resources to be helpful.
But I guess the combination of a graph and curmudgeonly article title proved too irresistible and this one got some play.
The only languages I have planned at the moment are Italian, English, German and Russian, roughly in that order. I think Swedish will eventually be possible, but I don't want to spread myself too thin.
Before now I've half-heartedly tried to write a script that would give flash cards based on a combination of word frequency in common texts and the amount of times I've gotten the word correct in the past. It didn't work. I should try your app.
I'm currently only using it to calculate a modified version of the Dale Chall readability score. Figured people could make good use of it and it would be a good way to drive people the the site.
How much hand tuning does this process require? If you had a corpus of German news articles, for instance, could you just run the software and receive a sorted frequency list?
Just downloaded the app and it's awesome. Thanks for making it!
I'm leveraging RSS feeds from popular papers in the languages I'm supporting with some weights applied so no single source is overly dominate in the feed. That said, I need to add more Portuguese and French sources, which is something I'm planning to take on this weekend. Right now the only paper from Portugal I've included is Correio da Manhã. If you have a favorite paper, let me know and I'll look to add it.
In terms of control, you can filter by country of origin. Please let me know if you think that is sufficient to address your concerns or if there is more I should be doing to separate the European and Brazilian Portuguese.
German might happen before English depending on how much ground I cover supporting more navigation languages.
Beyond that I'd need to do some research on which languages to support.
Duolingo Spanish has a new "Stories" section that quizzes you in the context of a story.
I'm also digging their new Podcast, which tells stories, NPR-style, alternating between Spanish and English.
I first build this prototype with the goal of generating sentences and then analysing the user translation because I wanted a feature to see if the user knows the word even though he misspelled it.
I finished that 3 months ago, received feedback but its just a proof of concept and since then have been building v2 which is very similar to what you have build - the idea is to have users learn vocab and then match them up with fitting text. This v2 is almost done but not deployed yet.
I do however plan on going much much further then this. I have been looking for a co-founder who is also invested into e-learning and language learning. Maybe we should team up? Email is:
Michael . baumgarn at gmail . com
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-search/id1311744...
I noticed that there is some interest in Russian here. I can add that in the future. There wasn’t enough room on the controller so I left it out.
I want a good desktop experience. I'd love something that would ping me every few hours to make me exercise my language practice.
