- https://www.duolingo.com/ (language learninig)
- https://www.chessable.com/ (chess)
- https://readwise.io/ (book highlights)
- https://examarly.com/ (test prep)
- https://app.bestudious.io/login (certifications - CFA)
- https://magoosh.com/ (vocabulary)
You seriously need a basic beginner book if starting from fresh, and use Duolingo just as a repetition tool when you can during the day
Going to a fixed sequence of learning "the path" so that you're forced to cover topics and words in a specific order, and then introducing grammar that has never been taught... Why? Either cover them in order, or don't.
Eventually, you figure out the right answer by trial and error and "learn" it, but only after having developed a bad habits and wrong answers... Why? Of course there are Anki's and such out there that cover all the words so I guess they want you to just do that.
You can pick a lot worse to learn to be able to stumble through a language for vacation.
Learning the first few words in a language to start becoming competent in it is not a bad thing. Managing one's expectations is really important.
Not all learners will learn best with a textbook or course first. Variety helps.
Humans have learned language by speaking before as much as, if not more than reading/writing.
Now, are there better apps coming out for this kind of thing? Absolutely. The potential for LLM to be able to generate and listen to pronunciation will be amazing.
Prioritizing speaking before learning to read or write a language really seems to irk some folks.
I'm learning Japanese now through books, Anki, and a few webapps. The gamification is gone and streaks don't really matter. I'm sticking with it because I'm enjoying learning, not because the owl is threatening me.
It didn't teach me to speak alone but expanded my vocabulary enough to stumble through conversations. Which was enough to being improving through speaking with locals.
What Anki provides:
- Open source guarantees your data won't be gone and/or unusable when the company goes bankrupt in a few years
- General purpose, fully customizable card creation
- Tunable scheduler, recently also fully tunable scheduling systems like FSRS.
We have a Linear Algebra course (https://mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra) that some of you might find interesting given how often that topic shows up on HN, and we just finished our Math for Machine Learning course (https://mathacademy.com/courses/mathematics-for-machine-lear...) for anyone who might be interested in giving that a look.
I'm the founder if anyone has any questions.
Sorry about the shameless plug.;)
Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to learn JS/TS, regex, and SQL (especially in conjunction with Jennifer Widom's Intro to Database lectures).
(Given your background with Ruby, have you thought about doing a Ruby course? I find it relatively easier finding resources for JS, Python, and even Rust. I imagine you could make an amazing Ruby introduction, though perhaps it would require more work than JS/TS than I would expect.)
Given that SRS is a long-term endeavour, going on several years, I'd balk at paying $49/month for your app. Maybe $60/year, but your current pricing is really hard to swallow.
I'm very interested in your methods of proofs and abstract algebra courses and I'm excited for them to be released!
It’s just a standard flashcard tool like Anki, but with a much better user interface and a simpler (IMO superior) SRS algorithm.
My experience with Lingvist was the opposite. The UI feels polished and the sentences feel natural and comfortable to learn even for a beginner. It's a shame that it's so expensive - I'd quite happily pay $100 or so for a lifetime membership but sadly they don't offer that.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=frenya.v...
You get all the code highlighting and markdown support built-in to the IDE. I used this plugin when studying data structures and algorithms for cracking faang interviews.
...and of course I still fell off the wagon after a few months, came back to a backlog in the thousands, and have had tremendous trouble getting back on the wagon.
I am by no means a Japanese expert learner, but I am having much better luck just memorizing real vocab without that intermediate step.
As someone pointed out about the much famed "Remebering the Kanji", you could remeber all the kanji perfectly and still not be able to read Japanese, because Japanese kanji is not equivelant to vocabulary. Actual words, pronunciation and meaning all change when you combine kanji into words.
It's good tangential knowledge to shore up your learning, but it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese.
You want to memorize in usage order as you are, nominally, an adult. You understand complex concepts and have developed motor skills. There is little point in learning in the order that a child would.
> it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese This is also true. You can do both. In fact I think you /should/ do both, learning new vocabulary using the kanji you've learned so far to help motivate you to learn more. It's quite addicting when you can see your progress day-to-day.