Hacker News Reader

I'm hugely in favor of graded sentence level translations especially for adult language learners. It is a more natural form of spaced repetition and requires much less will power to stick with it. Finding decent suitable corpora is the difficult part but very amenable to crowd sourcing efforts.

Also see this link for why reading is a really good way to acquire language: http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num1/mcquillan/default.html

View on HN

Sorry, what do you mean by "graded sentence level translations?"

Also, this article is really supportive of our project, thanks!

Sentence level translations, rather than word or paragraph level, graded by difficulty as beginner/intermediate/advanced.

You can look up more about that research from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading

Ah, ok, now I understand. The problem might be that we aren't using machine translated texts, but human translated. So when matching translations, often sentences don't have a 1-to-1 matching. Translators often change sentence structure to better suite the new language (there are even instances of translators adding new characters in the book).

In any case, it's a very interesting problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com