Comment by djb_hackernews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djb_hackernews | Hacker News Reader

Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana.

1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books

2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates

3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting

4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a social network app

5) I'm bored partying with my new friends, I'm going to level up and build an app to learn a new language

6) I'm lonely, I'm going to build a dating app to find a mate

7) I found a mate and the whole engagement/wedding industry is a fraud, I'm going to make an app to make it easier to navigate

8) My children are awesome, I'm going to build apps to manage their time/friends/eating/sleeping/learning

9) Technology is a waste of time, I'm going to spend my time on other hobbies and my family

10) I've been working 20 years in a boring industry and I see an opportunity to write boring software that solves boring problems that businesses will actually pay for. Jackpot.

Edit: As others pointed out, should have included: ToDo app, Blog App, and a travel app. Travel should probably be 5 with language at 6.

You say this snarkily, but I don’t see what is wrong with someone growing up and wanting to try to use coding to solve problems relevant to their stage of life.

It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed.

It’s because there are building blocks that don’t exist yet, so when you try to make the thing you end up getting distracted making a building block—or eight—and then your schedule gets shot and this kills the project.

But there’s no shame in that. If we’re lucky, you made a new building block which will eventually mature, in one form or another, maybe just in conversations with other devs who are closer to cracking that low level problem.

And then guess what... time is ripe for a hubristic person, young or old, to step up and try their hand at your original problem, now with one more building block. There’s now a 5% higher chance of success. Eventually someone will hit a threshold.

Is your post meant to be more than classic HN stop energy?

Not meant to be snarky at all. Though I do wish my comment wasn't the top voted one. People, please upvote the other on topic comments or have the mods bury it.

FWIW this is basically my path. I've done pretty much all of them to some degree and a few in earnest. In fact I'm working on my own language learning "tool" while I wait around for #10.

Any discussion of computerized language learning is woefully incomplete without a mention of [0], which has an interesting combination of properties.

It is:

* A) run by people who suck at SEO and marketing

* B) technologically and graphic-design wise really janky

* C) harder and less fun than e.g. Duolingo

* and D) drastically, overwhelmingly more effective than every other system I've ever seen at actually teaching you a language (for people with almost all common linguistic-cognition neurotypes aka nearly everyone)

The first 3 attributes mean that almost nobody has heard of it/uses it.

The downside is that for most languages they didn't build out enough curriculum to get you to fluency. It'll take you roughly a third of the way there. I'm building an open source clone (with longer curriculum) for the other two thirds of the way.

Also, L101 should be paired with Yabla, which will train the skill of listening-and-understanding in your target language.

I'm not affiliated with [0] in any way other than by being a happy customer and by the fact that I'm writing an open source clone of their stuff.

[0] https://language101.com/

I agree with you that topcommentness can subtly but immensely change a comment's meaning, through no fault of the commenter or even any individual upvoter.

The problem is the attitude "this problem is unsolved and no-one seems to be working on it. I'll fix it, even though I'm not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything".

Don't get me wrong, this is a very common problem for engineers (I'm an engineer and I fall into that trap every now and then). But from the post, what's lacking is actually talking and working head-head with teachers and linguists and people doing language learning research, because, you know... these people have actually spent their whole life trying to teach other people languages. So they might know a thing or two, that an engineer trying to teach himself a language might be missing.

I'm not sure where you get this.

I studied linguistics in college and one of my cofounders got her degree in linguistics from Harvard. Another of our employees is a computational linguist from Cambridge.

Additionally, all of the curriculum and much of the course methodology itself was designed by teachers who have been teaching languages both online and in the classroom for years.

We have additionally consulted active linguists and educational psychology researchers to see if there is anything else we should be looking at in their fields that we can apply.

This post was about how my understanding of the product I felt I wanted as a customer was formed. Linguists and teachers built the curriculum and work with the engineers here to see how we can apply the ways they want to teach.

If that's the case, then I'm sorry I got the wrong impression, but it was the tone on your post that led me to that. Before your reply I took a look at the about page on your site and saw the diverse team. You should've give them more credit to them and how you searched for that type of support when building the app. Otherwise it's very easy to reach a similar conclusion to the one I got.

I think the problem with this view is that academic linguistics has a limited amount of useful information to tell people who are trying to learn a language. Absolutely people learning a language need informed linguistic advice. And our understanding of language learning is much less rudimentary than it used to be. But linguistics is a multidisciplinary, multiparadigmatic field in which there is serious disagreement over some very basic questions. Dost of the good language apps definitely include that.

But a lot of language learning is about keeping up motivation and finding ways to access and practice the target language more often, to bring down the barriers to using and communicating in the language. Good software tools can help there, because we can't all afford personal tutors at $30/hour.

The “even though I’m not an expert in the domain... because coding fix everything” part of your stereotype is not accurate in this case (see Scott’s reply), but even if it was, the approach and attitude you criticized is how some of the most original new solutions to tough problems have started. If someone’s bothered to make something, at least give them the benefit of neutrality by evaluating their actual output.

Excellent. You forgot that each step must be announced on HN with a title like "Walking my dog was hard. So I wrote this app."

Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even as our tools and solutions have been improving rapidly. More people trying to innovate in this space will only improve them further.

Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.

while i enjoyed the rant ;-) please also share the list of boring problems that business will actually pay for..

Build them a website, an API, and a couple of services.

Don't forget static blog engines

You gotta support that Markdown or else you're nothin'!

Here's a new JS framework that's exactly like Vue, but with much less functionality, making it faster to learn.

I'm guilty of this. Hopefully, the experience will teach me a few things. Like how some actors have to get their bad acting years out of their system to move to the next level.

Wow, this is remarkably accurate..

You alao missed dog walking app. I'm pretty sure there has been some variation on that for the past 3 years as a senior project at my university.

That's awesome. It just seems to need a todo app sprinkled in somewhere. Maybe somewhere around 1st job?

Could you add expected stage half-life? I'm stack @8 and would like to advance to 9 ASAP.

Yes, getting a better overview of what your progress and work left to do in each level is on our short list. For now, you can always contact us with the Intercom button in the bottom right if you have issues like this and we can see if something is weird or manually advance you. Thanks!

you forgot laundry.

Mom doesn't do my laundry anymore; doing laundry sucks; the world desperately needs an uber-for-laundry app.

This is a tragedy. Why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? Why don't we just have one system/app that does everything (buy/sell books, find roommates, cost splitting, etc.)?

Hopefully what I'm suggested is not step 11: https://xkcd.com/927/

Absolutely love it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com