Hacker News Reader

Comment by adityashankar | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah, I built so much stuff to learn German, for example [1] to give me random German texts, force me to read it, and answer it, I created [2] to automatically make flashcards for me and then use with with a flashcards app I regularly use and [3] to help me memorise German cases and word-genders. I love it!

I did think of implementing this conversationally, but tbh it has always been too expensive thus far, I gotta retry with GPT-live-1, I tried it with elevenlabs before but it wasn't live enough and the models were not intelligent enough.

[1] https://river.berlin/projects/german-learning-helper/ [2] https://river.berlin/projects/flashcard-generator/ [3] https://river.berlin/projects/german-cases-trainer/

View on HN

Yeah my current approach till now has been ElevenLabs Scribe v2 transcription, then feed that to Gemini Live. The latency isn't too bad, but it's definitely there.

When you use ChatGPT Live it's instant which is great, although the realtime transcription still kinda sucks, especially if you're a newcomer to the language so you're making mistakes. I'll constantly get responses to something it thinks I said but I didn't say, which is a real hard blocker for a language learning app.

I think what I'll land on is Scribe v2 (the full thing, not realtime) transcribing turns - it is exceptionally accurate for this - and then just feeding that text direct to GPT Live.

Would you say your German has improved as a result? Genuinely curious

Oh yeah definitely, That being said what helped me more than anything is the flashcards app and speaking German with my roommate regularly.

Nonetheless, in complete honestly I do also have a German tutor who I see once a week for 50 minutes, I am very reliable on completing my work though, the "progressbars" in my flashcards app do keep me motivated.

Learning a language is really hard and takes years, but mentally I am convinced, that if the progressbars in the flashcard app I use reach 100% and also in my German cases app, that I will get closer to speaking perfect German, this keeps me motivated.

Oooh thats a good idea and gave me the idea to add a multilanguage flashcard page to my site.

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com