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Comment by hugs | Hacker News Reader

I would love this for French. How do you want to handle modifying the code for other languages on GitHub? A new separate project fork per language, or a pull request to the current one? Slightly problematic that "Italian" is in the top level project name if it's going to be configurable for other languages.

Also, add a tip jar somewhere so we can chip in!

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In the meanwhile, try this to train your ear and practice French with current news using easy vocabulary (they do speak very clearly, worked wonders for me when I was learning).

https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-françai...

I do that already and love it. :) But would like to listen to more things in French besides updates on foreign wars and elections.

I learned French in large part by listening to the radio. Highly recommend France Culture when you are ready for it. It’s the radio 4 of France:

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture

try https://frenchspin.fr/category/le-rdv-tech/ for tech news

Merci !

Good question! Haven't thought that far ahead :D

I'd be happy to rebrand it if there's interest. The main issue is that generating an episode is around $3 roughly (~$1 on GPT4 APU, ~$2 on text-to-speech). So doing a daily episode in multiple languages might be a bit costly.

But if there's enough interest, I might be happy to fund it to get it going for a bit and see how it ends.

For the free sample, maybe run it once a week on Sunday? (But gate the daily feed behind a paywall?)

Either way, I'd be happy to fund a few weeks of a French version right now!

Those are not bad ideas and suggestions at all! Thanks!

Let me see if I can get a French episode generated for you today or tomorrow and if you like it, I'm happy to send some more your way :)

What is your level of French?

I'm A1 in French and got there primarily with Duolingo, a little Pimsleur... and lots of beginner audiobooks. Also a fan of RFI's "Easy French Newspaper" daily podcast, but yeah, it would be so much more interesting to have a tech-focused version of the concept.

On that note, another suggestion: Offering a mobile-friendly readable transcript to go along with the audio. (RFI does this.) Reading along with the audio is my preferred way to "listen" to French audiobooks.

Also, presenting the transcript in a readable form is another way to gate content behind a log in and/or upsell. Of course, yeah, would rather it all be free, but your costs are real!

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