Show HN: A New Way to Learn Languages
langturbo.com
https://www.langturbo.com (No signup required)
There are a lot of tools to learn languages, but most of them focus on beginners (understandably so, that’s where the money is) but not many exist that target intermediate or advanced learners. The ones that exist make you find content on your own and then import that into their apps, which can be tricky when you don’t know where to look.
LangTurbo has a unique curated database of podcasts by language (some even have dialect labels) that you can browse by topic, or search by keyword, so you can discover content and learn in the same place.
Having a good language learning method is important, but having the motivation to keep learning is much more important. Some tools like Duolingo try to keep you motivated with “gamification”. I don’t like that, I think it gives you a false sense of accomplishment without real improvement. The way LangTurbo tries to keep you coming back is via the content itself. My goal is that you discover some podcast that interests you enough to keep coming back to listen to new episodes, the same way you listen to podcasts in your native language. I wrote more about the method here [1]
The app also lets you learn without looking at the screen, you can listen to a podcast in the background and for each sentence you will first hear the translation in English and the native speaker after. I call it “poor man's Pimsleur mode”.
Some things I learned while building the app:
* Currently the best SRS algorithm is FSRS, the app uses this algorithm implemented in SQL (thanks to [2])
* Working with Expo (React Native) was a great experience, the app has web, iOS and Android (coming soon) clients sharing most of the codebase.
* A lot of non-English podcasts have a feed with English as the language. I had to build a “probe” to get the correct language of a podcast, based on the text and audio of the feed.
* Podcasts use “Dynamic Ad Insertion”, that means the content of the audio can change according to the request IP or the time of the request.
* Still amazed by all the things Postgres can do
Let me know what you think, happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://www.langturbo.com/blog/langturbo/getting-started