Show HN: Better Bilingual Texts for Language Learning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Better Bilingual Texts for Language Learning

smallworld.press

25 pointsdavidzweig7 comments

Very interesting work. Good luck with it. As a father of a bilingual child I was happy to stumble on this while browsing hacker news.

This is really awesome, I absolutely love it.

I've been trying to read dual text books in Polish and I did have the problem of Polish sentences being about 500 times longer than English. Personally, I solved it parsing the text for paragraphs and realining everything with shorter sentences.

Your solution definitely works better.

In case you're looking for feedback, I wouldn't use color as it both looks highlighted, and wouldn't allow highlighting. How about a 1px black outline to differenciate?

Thanks!

Previously, when making materials for my own use, I used to put the paste the texts into spreadsheets, with one sentence per line/cell. It works well.

This layout is only used for printed books (at the moment). Without the color it looks more elegant, it's true. I'll try the outline.

> Previously, when making materials for my own use, I used to put the paste the texts into spreadsheets, with one sentence per line/cell. It works well.

Yup. I created a script that would parse paragraphs, and create an HTML table automatically, with one row/sentence. This way at least you know where you are in the sentence :-)

Are you interested in language learning, or was this a one-time project?

I have a crazy project in mind, if you'd be interested in joining forces perhaps it would be more feasible to do it.

I've got a lot of language projects. The latest one is a very low-cost, programmable audio player (no screen even, but lots of buttons and colored LEDs). You create non-linear, interactive materials. I was going to make another 'Show HN' when I have the firmware ready.

Send me an email (on my profile), I'm interested to hear your idea.

Nice; added to my wishlist. Thanks!

"The El Principito / The Little Prince Spanish/English Bilingual Edition with Audio Download (English and Spanish Edition)" https://amzn.com/dp/1999706110/ $18.69 paperback

Here's a project I spent quite a lot of time on last summer. I filled quite a few notebooks with doodles and half-ideas and spent a lot of time staring at nothing with (likely) a confused look on my face.

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