NYT is trying to make money | Hacker News Reader

NYT is trying to make money

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22 pointsjaya5 comments

Ok, it's true that this looks like a naked grab for money, but honestly? If this app works the way I think it does, I'd seriously consider springing for the analogous thing for Le Monde or Nouvel Observateur---I've tried to buff my French by regularly reading the news, but the grammar and vocab targeted at a general audience is still just a smidge too dense for me to handle. Training wheels would be nice.

I suspect there is quite a market for this, actually.

entirely agreed. a suite of apps that took current foreign language periodicals and turned them into language lessons?

Take my money. please.

I think it's a great idea. Nobody's forced to buy it, so it's not like locking the main site behind a pay wall.

And if someone can learn a new language more easily with it, it has life-changing potential (I know that learning English changed my life, and I would have loved to have this back then).

Newspaper French is a little difficult to approach if you are not already fairly fluent; it's distant in style from colloquial French and uses some grammatical features that are likely to be unfamiliar.

I would suggest reading some Jules Verne! You can find full texts of his stories online in French and English, and reading them in parallel (with the English as a check on your comprehension) will help you hoover up a lot of vocabulary while enjoying a fun story.

I suspect there is quite a market for this, actually.

Japanese publishers sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "Learn English with Barack Obama" by taking his most famous speeches and annotating them. Yes, I think there is a wee bit of a market for selling practical English instruction to high-brow consumers in other nations. (Granted, a lot of people buying those books are paying for the experience of buying the book rather than paying to learn English, but that is true of plenty of software, too.)

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