Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki

ricotta.affineur.io

58 pointswilliamsss79 comments

I’ve been tinkering with Ricotta for about a year now and I'm happy to announce it’s ready to for others to use officially. Largely the time has been spent making the project a framework to spin up newer projects quickly which I can share details around if anyone is interested.

The app was born out of my frustration with Duolingo drilling me on words I knew. I moved on to creating custom Anki cards and found myself spending ages creating decks.

It’s free, uses spaced repetition under the hood, and focuses on helping you learn what you want to without a course structure.

I'd love to hear your thoughts or even feature requests: https://ricotta.affineur.io/

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Things the webpage should answer:

- If it's free, like you say here, that it's free.

- What languages does it work for?

- What's the process to start?

Things I'm curious about:

- Is this intended to be a business? How do we get surprised by this costing something or disappearing in the future?

- Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on what they're working on?

> Is this intended to be a business? How do we get surprised by this costing something or disappearing in the future?

The bottom says: Ricotta developed by Affineur Ventures

Their website says:

> Find the Perfect Buyer or Investor. Exit on Top.

I give it a high likelyhood of enshittification, as soon as profitable

I believe you’re incorrect.

When I google that phrase it’s from an “Affinity Ventures” which is unrelated.

Affineur Ventures seems to just be a cheese themed container (hence ricotta). The website just redirects to a login screen for something called “holey triangle” https://affineur.io/

I don’t think this is a private equity side project…

Hey you're right! Thanks for catching that.

I'm trying to create a brand that will sell apps outside of this app. I don't think this app is one people would pay much for its a passion project that has helped refine a business wrapper as I go through it such as Auth system, legal docs system etc.

Sorry I got the affineur/affinity thing wrong.

One I’d add is, “Can it be used offline/without a browser?”

That’s something that’s been nice about Anki. As long as I’ve got my laptop I can do reviews, even if I don’t have a connection or the internet is awful or costs money (flights, etc). It runs on everything too which has worked nicely on the Linux ultraportable I’ve dedicated to study purposes.

There isn't offline use no - but I'll have read into how I could accomplish this. Happy to add support if there's significant demand for it.

If anyone has articles for offline web apps I'll have a read through.

I'll update the marketing site to expand on those thanks for the feedback.

> - If it's free, like you say here, that it's free. I'm not entirely sure but no I don't think I will charge for this, unless I had expensive features users want as I'm out of pocket on this myself. Its namely something I'm hoping to learn from with marketing and foster a community around. I'm not sure where it will go as the moment its a passion project, with a wrapper such as auth that I plan to repurpose for profit in some way such as a second company or selling the code as a starter template.

- What languages does it work for? I can easily add support for others if there's requests so far these are what I added support for: Mandarin Spanish Hindi Arabic French Portuguese German Japanese Russian Italian Malay Persian Polish Greek Czech

- What's the process to start? 1. Add a word you wish to learn 2. It will generate 4 cards for that word with examples for you 3. Review the card based on your memory recall of "good" "okay" "bad" and you'll see the card based on spaced repetition more often until you have marked it as good enough times it will come up less frequently.

- Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on what they're working on? I'm open to adding internationalization! But want to get the english app at a point I can justify the time commitment.

I tried a little Japanese (the second language I know best). Not sure where the content comes from but the translations were wrong, the vocabulary was strange, and otherwise the cards did not work out for me. Seems like they were auto generated via AI or google translate or something, in any case they were not accurate or natural sounding. Maybe other languages are better but I wouldn't know enough to tell.

Anki is one of my favorite pieces of software ever so I was definitely willing to try yours. Seems like the feature that defines your app is auto-generation of a card / set of cards. Didn't see any way to create your own card, all you can do is put in an English word and get the automatically generated card added to your deck. So if that's not working well the entire thing crumbles.

Interesting idea that might have a future if it finds significant improvement. I think if it was ironed out I would still prefer it to spit out an anki compatible deck that I can use in Anki itself instead of in the ricotta web app.

If you have iOS/macOS, I've made a native app for mining Japanese web/ebook content into Anki (or Manabi Flashcards which is getting FSRS soon too): https://reader.manabi.io

I'm currently working on adding first-class Mokuro integration for manga mode, bilingual user-provided or Whisper-generated captions for video, an HDMI-input mode with realtime lookups, and local/BYOK AI features. And once I add Yomichan dictionary support, I will be able to go multilingual too. I also have a beta available via the Discord that resolves some bugs that I'm trying to release very shortly.

I've added Anki integration and am working on WaniKani + JPDB sync. Hopefully more service integrations soon too. I like to have nice defaults but let users keep their flashcards wherever they like. Ricotta too if there were an API.

I would download this if you had a latin language spin off

I'm working on going multi-lingual and will support most languages that exist on Wiktionary

Can i get your feedback on https://thehardway.app?

I tried the best I can to test specially Japanese and Chinese without speaking those languages myself.

the app uses real human content (audio and text) for the most part, so hopefully it comes natural enough. there is still some AI though

Just dropped in my email to try out the Japanese. I'll let you know.

I'm not really sure what to do with this -- I thought you wanted someone to take a look at some Japanese content, but I can't find any in the app/tutorial.

thanks! right, there is no content. you build your library along the way, the feedback request is about autogenerated flashcards (basically you create and import content and then it autogenerates flashcards for you)

At first glance this is well designed and something I would use. I'll have a play after work and let you know

thanks, i'd appreciate if you let me know what you think , this is still very beta

Okay I had a closer look now. Tbh I don't download anything that isn't a major brand product or open-source. I'm guessing the amount of work you put into this you're planning to monetize the app right? If so my first point of feedback would be to support either a web app or mobile app.

I really enjoy the concept behind the app focusing on subjects rather than structured lessons. I enjoy going on learning rabbit holes so this would fit me better than structured lessons.

Lastly a video or demo of the app would help as the UI is quite complex. It's not clear how I would go from importing a web page to using the cards for example.

Feel free to ping me if you have updates - happy to help support another indie dev!

Thanks!

I am the opposite, I always prefer local/offline if there is the option, I use 0 web apps.

On the video, yes, I totally need a video.

Good luck to you as well!

wow, this looks nice. I will download it this week to give it a go. At a first glance this looks like notion for learning languages.

I have been using Babbel, and while it's nice to have mini lesson to take each day... they offer no option to write out notes, or to look at the grammar and get some context, no extra examples and flashcard system is just awful.

thank you very much, will be happy to hear what you think!

All fair points of feedback. I use it for latin languages so getting a take on the quality of other languages is something I'll work on. Could you give me an example that it gave you that missed the mark?

I could have it output the deck into Anki I like that idea. I wrote a script that did this from CSV but it didn't have audio so I moved to this making the first gen of this app - its open sourced here if you would like to repurpose it https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt.... I could try and find my code I make to generate the Anki deck if anyones interested as well.

Custom cards is something I agree is a nice to have. If you have preferences please share I'll try to add them to future feature updates.

I'd have to see some serious stats to believe whatever SRS algorithm you use is better than FSRS (which is supported in Anki).

Stats for FSRS here (and elsewhere) [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18csuer/fsrs_is_now_t...

Yeah as someone working on educational software, anything hand-rolling their own SRS is a pretty big red flag. Beating FSRS is going to be next to impossible, especially FSRS with parameters optimized from your users’ review history.

FSRS is so cargo-culted. It's just an algorithm, claiming that any algorithm can't be improved is ridiculous.

Actually, we have found some algorithms which outperform FSRS[1]. Unfortunately, it's hard to deploy them in user's local device.

[1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark?tab=...

The app is using the same Anki FSRS algo its open source https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

Agreed would be swimming against the tide rolling a custom one. Anki's is awesome! This app functions much the same just makes card generation MUCH faster than Anki.

not OP. I have a competing product with an ad-hoc algorithm that I 100% believe is better than FSRS (tested it for months or real practice)

But what you ask is not feasible, neither I nor OP have 700 millions of reviews to stack up against FSRS.

I have my own experience and a bunch of simulations, and if FSRS were better I would have switched to it.

The reason in my case btw is that FSRS is generic, mine is tailor made for languages - big difference.

You don't need to beat FSRS with 700 millions of reviews. You can collect thousands of reviews for months and compare the ad-hoc algorithm with FSRS on those reviews.

It uses the same FSRS as Anki. You can see some of the logic in my open source version of the app here https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...

Anki uses this FSRS which is an open sourced algorithm https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

It doesn't handle homonyms well, since the AI isn't given contextual reference. The sentences are also too simple on advanced level, so you don't get much more out of it than just reviewing the words. The AI coming up with words for you doesn't add a ton of value, most languages have standardized tests with good word lists that learners should already be using. Adding the issues others mentioned, I think this is feasible but needs agents taking additional steps to mimic what a real tutor would do and formulate a useful short lesson.

Personally I find Duolingo great for Japanese, I have the opposite problem: I run out of hearts if I try to do review and the app rarely gives me much old content, so I don't practice it. If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for different levels I might use it to supplement. But letting users choose words/a topic is not necessarily important, most people don't know what they should study so it might be better to have "recommended" premade decks for different levels.

This is incredibly valuable feedback.

>The AI coming up with words for you doesn't add a ton of value, most languages have standardized tests with good word lists that learners should already be using. Adding the issues others mentioned, I think this is feasible but needs agents taking additional steps to mimic what a real tutor would do and formulate a useful short lesson.

I plan to refine the content certainly. If you have examples I could use for a baseline to achieve what you want that would help me back test against I'll try to add that into the next release batch.

> If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for different levels I might use it to supplement. I see the app to be used in tandem with a structured lesson rather than structured lessons in the app. Similar to an Anki study deck.

I had looked into lessons for the app on my 3rd iteration of this and went through a massive refactor for it all to be lesson based. In the end, it felt like AI slop so I kept it simple with vocab to start. In any case, I will refine the marketing copy to reflect that.

I am a working to learn a second language right now, one of the elements I have encountered is that I don't like is the anki apps UI, and the variety of stylings of anki cards from deck to deck, and how audio plays (or doesn't) depending on the app (web, mac, ios). Lot's of little UX frustrations that push me away from using it myself constantly.

I see from your LinkedIn for the site that the application: "automatically generates personalized Anki decks. With integrated spaced repetition, automated word examples, and native audio, it lets you build efficient, focused lessons—no rigid courses required."

Based on the wording and having used the application briefly before the application crashed, I'm assuming this is some kind of LLM backend that generates the text data for the cards as well as the audio from a TTS model for each card?

Please correct me if I'm wrong on that, because I've personally worked to build something similar for personal use and would love to read more about your framework and what's going on under the hood.

Sure I started from this app which is open source https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...

You're welcome to repurpose the code. It uses web text-speech api which I had a fair amount of beta feedback that the voices sounded robotic. So moved to a TTS model in the backend. This came with a load of heavy processing along with a translation model which crashed my app when I initially released it on r/languagelearning that had I had fun challenges to scale.

If its an app just for you, you can get away with more and greatly simplify the app.

Creating Anki decks takes time, how does Ricotta speed up the process? Does it have built in decks? If I'm learning Hindi, why should I switch? Will it really have great Hindi pronunciation? Is my data being used for anything?

Congrats on the launch. The website and the product seem really slick and you should be proud. The above questions are my honest reaction to seeing your site.

It supports Hindi! I haven't had any feedback from a Hindi native nor learner. If there's any feedback you can give, even if its to say the app is shit I would appreciate your take.

I have a test account and demo video I'm working on. I'll shoot it over later this week when I have one or the other so you can check it out without commitment or data concerns.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey William, I guess I didn't get exactly what it was from the homepage. I signed up and the service is awesome. I like how you can pick a word and get sentences made for you, that is really nice and does improve over the Anki experience. My only immediate feedback is that it would be nice to click on a single word and hear it instead of the whole sentence. Very well done.

However, I am concerned that it is free. Am I the product?

Right makes sense Duolingo has that feature as well.

Its free - I don't have plans to monetize this app. Its a passion project and at the moment costs me less than $30 a month to run. Its been a heap of fun to scale / market past what I do in my job day to day.

One more bit of feedback! It would be great if I could delete a word from my deck. Thanks again!

You can delete cards if you review a card, flip the back and click the trashcan icon on the upper left hand side.

Ideally users are relying on the spaced repetition algorithm and should see cards they know less frequently rather than removing them from their deck.

Is this opensource and compatible with existing anki decks?

> Is this opensource My first gen is open source https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt... if you'd like to repurpose it

This one has a fair amount of security and wrappers around the latest update I plan to repurpose for profit so unfortunately this project is not. Though I'm happy to share how its built if you have questions.

> compatible with existing anki decks?

No its not currently. How would you like it to work with Anki?

Ah, nah.

What algorithm are you using for SRS?

Anki recently updated to include (the much better) FSRS4.5 algorithm alongside their usual (and still default) SM-2.

In-case you haven't updated: FSRS 5.0 was released in Anki 24.11

Thank you, I hadn't noticed!

It uses an older version of FSRS. Now that I know I'll update later this week to v5. Thanks

Anki can be used to memorize anything. It is not specifically for learning languages.

Agreed. Anki is awesome! I just was spending too much time creating Anki cards and created this for my self. Some friends saw how I was using the first gen (https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...) and wanted it as well. So I made it into an app and researched a far around learning that I hope to pin down an app others can use too.

here's a great article on the power of spaced repetition any anki lover will enjoy - https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition

Importing data into Anki is mostly easy. It takes a delimiter separate format, semicolon by default. I prepared most of my larger decks just with some text processing followed by a CSV import. Cards with images just have HTML image tag references to file names. You generate the cards a CSV with the right HTML referencing the file names. Then make sure the files are located in the right directory.

Just tried it. I wanted a way to switch sides of the cards so I always have to produce the phrase in the language I’m trying to learn. Also a way to deal with cards where I doubt the translation. I was trying Spanish, and there were a bunch of translations that made me suspicious, especially translating Spanish future with English present. Even if it’s used that way, seems misleading? Also think I caught a misplaced accent mark and some other translations that seemed a little off, though I’m not fluent enough to be sure.

> I wanted a way to switch sides of the cards

Will add support for switching sides of the cards to the next release. My thought here is that once you have gotten the card correct _n_ times, you'll then will see the flipped english only side to reinforce memory recall. Albeit maybe this is better up to the user to change the mode.

I'm also playing around with another card type thats only voice and the user needs to type the answer.

> there were a bunch of translations that made me suspicious, especially translating Spanish future with English present.

There's an issue around single words vs the word in the examples. For example, "bill" in Spanish for the single card is "factura" when the examples are all using "cuenta". I'm working on improving this.

I'll run the output by a few native Spanish friends to ensure it's getting future tense correct.

I spent 10 minutes or so playing around with this and it is impressive. I've also built a couple of small side projects around language learning out of frustration with Duolingo.

I'm around a C1 level in French and am just starting to learn Polish. The audio pronunciations are a great feature here and (at least in French, where I can judge it) the accents are quite good. I can see this being quite useful for my Polish work for learning some of the basics.

Using it a bit more, it doesn't seem that the C1 or C2 level generated sentences are anywhere close to being C1 or C2 level. I'd be curious to understand the sentence generation process and how it is or is not attempting to generate sentences at various CEFR levels.

Agreed I have heard that feedback a few times now. I tried to make sure the A and B levels were pinned down as it was quite verbose in my testing. I'll have a look into C1 and C2 levels. If you have examples I can back test against I'll use them.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback. I started with web text-to-speech APIs and beta testers hated the robotic sounds so spent a fair amount of time getting text-to-speech right.

Looking forward to seeing more advanced ML models in the browser as that's how this project started really.

I really like this concept, and am working on a similar product for my own self-study.

I would like to see more language support. For me, I'd like to study Korean

The UX around card navigation needs some work. It took me a long time to figure out that after I chose a smiley face, that I was moving to a new card. This was especially true if the next card is similar to a previous card.

I can add Korean tonight. I'll ping you once its shipped.

What would you prefer over smiley faces? Something like "bad" "okay" "good"?

hey again I added Korean for you. I plan to add romanization support over the next week or so.

Give me a shout if you have any other things you'd like to see

Just tried it for German. The cards gave me the word without their article. Because grammatical gender is so important and impacts so many aspects (adjectives, case markers, etc), you really should learn the word with the article, otherwise you'll be in a world of pain later.

Yep I noticed that myself. I need to refine the translations better. If you have examples you would prefer to see for German I can back test against them.

How are you generating the decks? There are some incorrect translations, at least for for the version of Spanish I learned. Maybe there’s a dialect that says “ser usado” instead of “acostumbrarse” for “be used to”?

I've noticed this myself with Spanish, Italian and French. Such as the word for "bill" in the word card vs the example cards.

Its something I plan to refine in my next release.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I noticed later that the example sentences used the correct translation. Presumably that's because it's easier for translation software to differentiate among the various meanings of "used" when it's in the context of a sentence.

I think you're right. I'll add a final step to validate all the text based output to circumvent this.

Take a look into "What Our Learners Say" section as I can't see reviews on chrome (some kind of color issue). Otherwise app looks cool, gonna try this weekend!

Thanks will do. Please let me know your thoughts after you give it a spin.

I've updated the marketing site. I realized light mode users had a mixed version of the marketing page which is meant to be dark mode only.

The app will default to your dark/light mode preference. It can be set in settings additionally.

Is this open source at all? Can't find a GitHub link.

The first gen is https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...

Congrats on the launch!

Minor nitpicks:

Dark grey text on black background (navigational menu items, testimonials) is not readable.

Section 5 of your Terms and Conditions are, in part, utter nonsense. It says there that as a user of the service, I have to display cookie banners (how? where?) and other duties that make no sense whatsoever. Are you sure that this is what you wanted to say?

Great feedback thanks. Will have a look into these.

I've updated the marketing site since your comment.

Will be looking into legal copy again after I stop having fun with other feature requests.

Thanks for the follow-up!

People stop naming things after real existing words.

I use Anki a lot and thanks for these, this is great

oh yeah for improvement I think you can add shortcut keyboard so I don't need to hover around my mouse or bigger accessible button outside card area

Sure that's a great idea

Neither Ricotta nor Anki have been able to help me learn this language.

https://youtu.be/VJVS9RsIrN8

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