Show HN: Learn Spanish quickly while reading | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Learn Spanish quickly while reading

donquixote.fun

91 pointsPhillip9879842 comments

This is great, amazing idea!

However, I don't understand why you chose don quixote. That's not modern, normal, everyday prose, it was written 400 years ago.. any spanish kid would have trouble understanding it.

Any other modern (less than 100 years) and famous novel would be much adequate for learning spanish.

I agree it’s not very prosaic. I guess it has marketing value being a notorious story. Hopefully I can wrap it up and do a more modern novel. Any suggestions?

Is Love in the time of cholera both notorious and prosaic enough?

Modern as in classical modern or today's thrillers?

100 Years of Solitude?

This is what we used for reading & translating long passages in my American high school’s Spanish 5/AP Spanish course. I don’t have much to compare it to, but it seemed like a good choice at the time.

It would be fun to go to Mexico or Spain and talk 400 years old Spanish like it's normal.

I have been reading game of thrones in Spanish and it's hilarious what has happened to my vocab. Ability to describe armor and varieties of horses? Check. Ability to use slang or informal language relevant to peers? Not so much.

Judging from the way it was portrayed in https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4136774/ "The Ministry of Time / El ministerio del tiempo" your fate was at the hands of arbitrary and capricious authorities.

Any medieval fair held by crust punks will mimic that old Spanish so-so.

Hahha wow! This is so funny, I was going to be posting my Show HN today which is a platform for teaching Spanish through reading, and I saw this! You beat me to it for today, I think.

I'm so glad to see there are other folks interested in teaching Spanish through input. Would you have any interest in exchanging info to talk about what we are each doing? I bet we could both learn from each other! My email is in my profile, in case you're down :)

Anyway, congrats on the launch, and the best of luck to you!

This is awesome! Good job on it :) Wish you had a mailing list signup - I don't want to forget about this!

I took a one month Spanish class in Mexico a few years ago. It was amazing for giving me a solid base, and your tool would be perfect for getting regular practice in and learning new things.

Definitely agree with the other comments that a more modern book would be better. For me, probably a children's book haha. I can't imagine how much time it takes to translate though!

Idea:

- Create a list of a few books you could translate.

- Allow users to donate and select the book it would go towards.

- When donations reach the threshold, they're charged and you write it.

Like Kickstarter for book translations haha. Or maybe Patreon or something has that feature.

I also took a peak at your code and saw the manifest. This would be a pretty awesome PWA :)

I hope you keep at it!

I always thought this a great way to learn a language (from reading fiction such as Shogun where you're introduced to a lot of words from another language).

I imagine another way to do it would be to go more slowly. Start in all English and then transition to the target language so that the reader never has to press anything or re-read parts, so that by the end of the book it is all in the target language.

Really interesting approach. I've bookmarked the page. You should consider gathering emails to give updates.

This should be the new killer app for e-readers. That tech is generally closed with too low powered processors due to power requirements for it to be implemented in any current generation. But it is just right for this kind of reading/learning.

Are you doing the translation?

Thanks, I used Google Translate at first. I have a family member that does it professionally so I may work with him going forward.

I also bookmarked as I have been learning spanish on and off.

I like that it starts with english, so that I have to try to guess what the Spanish is first. I missed the 'de' in 'de cuyo nombre' and now I don't think I'll easily forget.

This is a great start. Obviously an MVP but perhaps you might want to consider highlighting the sequential changed word. For example: In a lugar de La Mancha might be a nice add to emphasise the change and reinforce lugar = place etc?

Good idea

Love the concept!

Do you have any numbers or stats on its impact on language learning? Is it more or less effective than just learning a vocab list? What base level should one have before using it? etc...?

This is really good, but I think learners would benefit a lot if English had one color and Spanish another, so we can distinguish which is which. (Disclaimer : I am not a native English speaker)

Nicely done OP.

If you guys liked this, then there are similar solutions posted for the problem 'Teach me vocabulary without spending extra time'[1] on my problem validation platform.

As the problem title implies, it's about integrating language learning as part of our regular reading efforts. OP, You're welcomed to share your work there as well.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/169-teach-me-vocabulary-without...

Cannot get past slide 19 on iOS Safari. “Next” button does nothing.

Thanks, yeah it’s an MVP. Was trying to gauge interest before I complete the whole translation.

It’s a good idea. But the book is a bad choice.

“un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero”, is a great example of why this is the case.

Oh I'd definitely love to see this completed. I don't speak Spanish, so I'm not sure if this would be a problem here - are all sentences in Spanish guaranteed to have an almost one-one translation to English? In other words, what happens when the word order changes? This would be a huge deal in German.

Thanks, no the order differs in Spanish as well. That’s why it’s going to take me a while as I’m going over the Spanish and English translations and trying to make it work. I will try to honor the Spanish order more than the English, even if that makes the English sound weird. The idea is you know English, so it doesn’t have to be very understandable on the English side. Just enough to give you the context.

German would definitely be problematic but it's still likely to be one of the least affected, especially in the English -> German direction, and nearly every word would at least has a clear translation. Virtually any sentence in an SOV (or less common, OSV) language would be essentially unworkable while maintaining word order.

German SV2O is still very jarring to me as a language learner; I just can‘t get used to looking forward in the sentence to decipher the verb, as compared to English.

Definitely, as a fellow German learner. The "flexibility" or unpredictability of word order, largely due to the greater inflection based on grammatical case, makes it much more challenging unless one is a native speaker who can probably more intuitively decipher the roles of each word.

Also one sentence order might sound right in the one region and totally awkward in another. As a native speaker its mainly intuitive

My native language is Spanish. An interesting thing about it is that changing the word order generally does not change the meaning but it changes how it sounds (more prosaic or more poetic). That's not a hard rule, I'm sure you can also find examples where changing the word order changes the meaning.

I also agree with the rest of the comments here, the original Don Quixote is not a good book for learning Spanish, see here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#Style

A modern children's adaptation of the story may be a good choice for learning if OP wants to use the same story.

This is really very promising and well executed. Any plans for additional texts and languages in the future?

I can see doing les mis for French and other seminal works of their respective languages. I guess I’ll try and finish this one first.

That's a pretty cool approach! Alas, the interface seems to have gotten stuck on step 9 for me.

Thanks, yeah. I wanted to see what HN thought before I took the time to finish it. Looks like I will.

One more vote of support. I'm reading it now.

I've always wished that Kindle had this. One can buy a Kindle translation (and some popular books have communities around translations: https://tinwhiskers.net/post/harry_potter_spanish, https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/9229774/Harry-Potter-in-S...) as well as a translating dictionary, but one must find a book that's very close to the reader's level or reading will be impossibly slow (highlight word, click to translate, repeat). Your contextual translations and next/play button are way faster.

You might consider Platero and I and the rights allow it.

Always mean to try a Assimil course. Which is a similar idea I believe of reading along to an audio books.

I’d like to check it out but on my phone the top and bottom of the pop up is cropped and I can’t scroll or close it.

Thanks, will fix.

Interesting MVP. I'm interested in how this progresses further.

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