Comment by barrell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrell | Hacker News Reader

Still working on https://phrasing.app - an app for polyglots to learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI. Just finished a onboarding flow, now updating the search and create experience to fall more in line with actual usage from users, then hopefully prepping for a more public launch :)

Had a fun week fixing up the application so it’s 100x faster on 5 different axes, and it’s starting to feel really well polished. Also started to move from reagent to preact/signals in a long slow migration hopefully to hsx.

I also moved the critical algorithm logic into an independent Clojure file that is compiled (and tested) with cherry-cljs — I’m hoping to expand this to ClojErl and jank so I can have isomorphic Clojure code running on the browser, BEAM server, and native swift app :D

It’s getting really close to done, I’m using it now to study 18 different languages, including some really minor ones like Maltese, Welsh, and Cantonese (not sure if Cantonese is really a minor language, but definitely low learner resourced) and it’s easy, slick, and surprisingly effective!

I was a linguist in a former life, so these apps always intrigue me. I've made a few attempts myself over the years. Yours looks slick and would've been an interesting one to check out if I were learning a language.

I signed-in and took a look around getting a few "Error rendering home" errors occasionally, fyi.

I was a little surprised at the CC#/subscribe page, since the prices didn't seem to be matching up with the marketing pricing page.

You might want to consider having like a sandbox account with some sample materials so people can feel the power of the app rather than depending on someone subscribing based on the video only.

Cool idea!

Thanks for the kind words! Sorry about the errors, I’ll get these sorted out.

The CC page will be updated next week sometime - for now I’m letting people register at the old prices (50%) while I’m plugging all the holes.

And the sandbox is coming! It’ll be on the marketing page, just under the video. It’ll probably take a month to get around to though. That, plus a trial week ($3.99) should hopefully give the user a taste

> learn over 120 languages in the most effective manner and a beautiful UI

Why would you need a UI if the basic way to learn a language is to speak to someone? (I suppose you meant graphical UI.)

Wouldn't a good STT/TTS interface be more appropriate?

Why do you need a beautiful UI? Because you need something to use for thousands of hours.

Why have a visual interface at all? It’s more convenient to use, is way more engaging, and just better for learning. There is an audio component to the app, and I’m sure more and more audio components will be added, but I would be surprised if in-app audio ever exceeds half of my usage.

For example there is a shadowing exercise that is purely audio based (put in headphones and press play). But what if you want to see what a word means? Or see its gender/case/tense? Mark it as easy or hard, remembered or forgotten? I can look all this information up, plus read a few paragraphs of explanations in less time than I would take me to formulate a question.

Sounds nice! A word of advice, instead of claiming 120 languages, I feel it would be better to focus on a few an ensure that they work well with native speakers.

You are talking about a very different product :) I have spent over a year making sure everything works for many languages. The whole point is to have one interface, for all my languages, big and small.

Additionally, please try it out before assuming they’re just claims. I’ve been using it daily for 3 months in 18 languages (roughly one from each major language family), and been in pretty constant contact with native speakers.

True I cannot vouche for all 120 languages, and sure there is the occasional error in the lower resource languages. However, I have put in a lot of work to make sure I have a representivie sample, and the errors are currently well within an acceptable range — and I’m working hard to improve them!

Yes, it's a religious website, but it's also the site with the most languages of any site on the 'net, at 1100+ right now. Some of them are downloadable content only, most are web content as well. The translations are done at least in part by native speakers of the target language.

Figured you'd appreciate the complexity of having that many languages on a site. jw.org.

I've been learning languages for almost 10 years now but your site UI is unusable on mobile

I assume you mean the marketing site, probably on android, most likely Firefox? I’ve received that feedback just haven’t had time to get around to it.

It should be fixed now though :) let me know if you have any more issues!

PS the app is very smooth inside, there was just a rendering issue on the home page.

"Error occured rendering base application" - on an older iPad.

If I am associating the right error, it’s because you’re missing a critical browser API. I will add an intercept to show a message instead of an error, but I won’t be able to support legacy versions of browsers while it’s just me unfortunately

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