Show HN: Felingua – Language practice by writing pages and reviewing flashcards | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Felingua – Language practice by writing pages and reviewing flashcards

felingua.com

31 pointsianjakobs21 comments

Creator here. As I’m currently learning Spanish, I started reading the Harry Potter books out loud to my partner (a native speaker) a while ago to get exposed to new vocabulary and practice my pronunciation. From this, I then wanted to review those new words as flashcards, and I also discovered I enjoy writing brief summaries afterwards to practice actively producing content without the time pressure I might have when speaking. I built Felingua to help me with that, with the current main features being:

  1. Write pages in the language you’re learning and look up translations without having to switch context
  2. Get feedback on your writing automatically with suggestions on grammar and spelling and ask a person you know to correct it
  3. Create cards both from corrected text and translations and review them with spaced repetition to learn from your mistakes and expand your vocabulary

Happy to hear your thoughts or answer any questions!

Hello, any idea on the pricing once out of beta? I'd rather not start to use a service now and having to leave once it gets too pricey for me (times are tough).

I have no details to share at the moment, but the idea I have now is to at least always keep a free plan available. One option I'm considering is for a potential paid plan to then have more advanced features, such as fully customizable translations.

That said, when that time comes, I believe it only fair to try and keep early users with at least the current functionality available to them.

Thanks. Any idea on an ETA?

Also not yet, unfortunately. I wanted to hold off on that until hearing some more thoughts from users.

If you're interested in following along, I try to be open about working on Felingua over on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ianjakobs.

Looks interesting. I am also learning Spanish at the moment and have tried translating children's stories as a form of exercise but it is a bit of an effort. My biggest problem is that I am never 100% sure whether the translation service I use, Deepl, is accurate enough.

For instance, a translation service won't advise me on whether the preterite or imperfect was more suitable, and in fact, that sort of nuance is often conflated to the same translation in English.

I haven't signed up yet, but I like the look of it so far.

Absolutely agree. At the end of the day there's only so much those services can pick up, so at some point you're bound to run into limitations there.

To address this with Felingua I've added in two methods of getting corrections on the pages you write:

  1. Automatically, by using LanguageTool.
  2. Manually, by allow you to request people you know to review.

The former is great for spelling mistakes or simple grammatical errors, but the latter is where you'll eventually get the most out of once you're at more of an advanced level. I haven't found any service yet that can substitute that.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts if you decide to give it a try!

I was hoping this was using a markdown engine to create notes, as it would be nice to have something portable and open.

I understand, and that's a fair point. For cards I went with JSON so that I'm able to add structure to translations, e.g. to show alternative translations and example sentences and highlight certain words.

That said, I do plan on exposing the API and allowing full data exports, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

Did you take inspiration from Luca Lampariello? He's a polyglot YouTuber and has a similar approach, of written translation to and from L1 and L2. That community on YouTube may offer a source of ideas, and potentially even some marketing for you.

I can't say I'm familiar with him, but I just had a cursory look and his approach looks interesting (and indeed similar in some regards)! Thanks for the recommendation.

Would be nice to see most popular non-latin alphabet languages support: Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian.

Definitely! The main reason I haven't yet added support for any of those languages is just that I'm unfamiliar with them, to be honest, as I'd want to make sure they're _fully_ supported, both in terms of translations and corrections.

Is there any language in particular you'd like to see added?

Chinese for me, but I'm sure there's others needing all 3.

What is there to support? You've got to connect it to a translation service? Is there not just a Google API?

It's translations, text-to-speech, and corrections. I'm pretty sure the services I currently use support all this, but there's some things built around that such as word counts for the heat map that will need looking into.

I'm certainly interested in adding them though! Will try and look into it soon and let you know.

Yes, I personally would like to see Chinese and Japanese. I would happily pay for Grammarly-like daily use tool as well, in fact, for Chinese. From what I know, there is no such tool for Chinese language whatsoever.

The service I use for automatic corrections is LanguageTool (https://languagetool.org/), and they support Chinese. It's hard for me to judge the accuracy, but I know that for Spanish it's good at picking up grammar and spelling mistakes.

I just tried very simple inherently wrong Chinese phrase "我学校中文。" and it found no mistakes in it. I expected it at least point to the error or even suggest to correct the second word to become "我学习中文。"

Another vote for Chinese! (can't wait to show this to a friend who's working on their English)

Looks cool, will try this out

Thanks, feel free to let me know what you think!

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