Comment by amelo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelo | Hacker News Reader

Here are some examples of our flashcards for Spanish: https://deckmill.com/decks/es

A little of backstory about this project: my co-founder and I are big fans of Anki, which is an awesome flashcard software and a really effective tool for language learning.

However, it's hard to find quality decks online. There are some apps with good flashcards, but they tend to be expensive. You certainly can make your own, but that's really time consuming. That's why we decided to build Deckmill, a repository of high quality, but affordable flashcards.

For those are interested in the tech, this is how we did it: 1. Used a mix of ML + hand curation to select 3000 sentences from tatoeba.org (a massive dataset) 2. Then machine translation to translate the sentences 3. Then we had native speakers review the translations 4. Wavenet to generate audio 5. genanki to put together the cards

Fluent speaker of Spanish as second language. The audio here is terrible for learning the language, "Mi hermano es medico" is pronounced as though two Venezuelans are talking at a dinner party. It needs to be slower and more distinctly enunciated for a learner.

Hi spoonjim! In our experience it's important to train your ears to listen to native speakers as early as possible in the learning process. However, you are correct that listening to slow speaking is also very pedagogical -- this is exactly why we provide a 0.5x speed version of the audio, alongside the 1x (native-like) version.

Yes, I tried the 0.5x version, but it's not the way that a Spanish teacher talks. A good Spanish teacher emphasizes the parts of the sounds that are different from English, and doesn't slow down even close to 0.5x -- it's more like 10%, but a much clearer 10%.

In this example, a Spanish teacher would have put more of a pause between "Mi" and "hermano", not such a weird elongation of the "o" in "hermano", and less emphasis on the "es" (even a native conversation would not have that kind of stress on the "es").

This sounds like a recipe for only being able to talk to Spanish teachers.

How do you feel about the community Anki decks out there today (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/)? I guess you've found some deficiencies with those?

Hi ngokevin! The Anki community is fantastic and there are some great decks out there. However, we found that the quality, format and even difficulty tend to vary wildly across decks. For example, many decks have low quality audio or don't include it at all; others have poor sentence selection, etc

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