Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

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There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on.

I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.

It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.

Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.

Playing briefly, looks pretty good! -- though I wonder if there's a way to move away from using a source language (or maybe it does this in later lessons?). You really want to try to get your head 100% inside the target language as quickly as possible, and not be translating back and forth.

You can do this with the "free dialog" option from the beginning. The only issue with this is you do have to reference the actual lesson material to that point, so it's more of a review piece.

That said, my impression is getting to functional in a language quickly requires referencing a source language that is fully understandable by the user to build vocab and comprehension - ie. explaining a new concept in the target language using the target language for a B1 student is going to be inefficient and not expressive enough. Otherwise you're fortifying what you already know vs. actually building more knowledge. Things like comprehensible input are great but seemingly more indirect and less efficient.

If you have an option to get from zero to B2 fairly quickly, you are functional enough in the target language to use a myriad of options to fluency, including doing nothing other than conversing with others.

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