Alex-Programs

I really wish there were. It'd make things a lot easier for me!

There aren't really existing unambiguous language icons, at least for the majority of languages, so it'd be less about making them a formal emoji and more about actually inventing + "legitimising" new icons so they can be broadly and uncontroversially used.

I doubt that'd happen in practice - there just isn't a pressing need, and you'd need an enormous (and likely controversial) public education campaign to make them adoptable - but it would be a neat design problem. r/vexillogy would have a field day.

India is definitely a difficult one. I'm using it to represent Hindi, and that's the one that makes me the most uncomfortable, because there are so many languages. I think the intent is reasonably clear, but if all countries were that ambigious, I'd avoid flags.

Nuenki supports European Spanish (though now you mention it, I ought to make that clearer). If it were American Spanish, I'd probably use Mexico. I handle Portuguese that way.

Switzerland is easy, because I have no need to include their flag. German is covered by Germany (yes, I know of Austria), French by France, etc.

And I'm highly unlikely to add Romansh, if only because it'd be very difficult to translate with good quality. I would if I could though, I find it fascinating. For a flag, I'd find an online Romansh community and ask what flag people would find most respectful + representative, or if people would prefer I forgo it.

You argue that it's misleading. I see where you're coming from. It isn't perfectly explicit and unambiguous. However, I don't think it's misleading in practice.

Nobody looks at a Spanish flag and thinks it's denoting Catalan - I'd probably use a regional flag there - nor do people look at a Union Jack or an American flag and go "no idea what that's for". When looking to see if Nuenki supports Finnish, nobody looks for the Swedish flag. They look for the Finnish flag.

People know what the stereotypical flags are, particularly when they're learning that language.

So imo it's about absolute precision vs UX, and the UX of reading through a textual list of languages is awful. It's a complete pain to scan through without any kind of visual indicator. That's why, in practice, everyone uses flags.

I didn't previously use flags so widely. Adding them everywhere (e.g. the dropdowns on the demo) was a result of feedback from people who felt it would make it nicer to use. Also, they're generally alongside the full name (aside from the aforementioned cloud), to clear up any ambiguity.

That'd be amusing. When you first install Windows, you get...

"Is the island to the east of mainland China (also known as Taiwan, or Chinese Taipei) part of the People's Republic of China?"

"What is the legal status of Gibraltar?"

"Who ought to have won the Cod Wars?"

And on, and on...

Alternatively, have your pick of

"Western (standard)"

"Western (tankie)"

"Chinese (the big one)"

"Chinese (the small, disputed one)"

"American (pro-Iceland)"

"American (pro-UK, for the purpose of the Cod Wars)"

"British (Still Irritated Over Suez)"

"British ('What's Suez?')"

Your idea is quite sensible, of course, but you could make it quite absurd if you liked. Perhaps I'll put something like this together one evening. I'm sure there are more silly disagreements to include than the ones I know of as a brit.

I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively.

I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one.

For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficult and rely on convention (e.g. the Egyptian flag for Arabic).

The landing page (https://nuenki.app) has a cloud of flags of the supported languages. It's an information dense, easy to scan way of seeing whether your language is supported. Sure, it's not technically 100% accurate, but what's the alternative?

Thanks!

> I've heard of Anki as a learning tool, but not tried it. What makes it miserable?

I'm a bit biased here. I used it prolifically for years in order to optimise my learning (school, not languages) so that I could compensate for a concussion. I heavily burnt out of it and I've not touched it since.

Nevertheless, if I were to say something more objective, it's that it's very dull. Other learning methods have you going over either somewhat-engaging content or intellectually stimulating learning (e.g. reading about the complexities of grammar).

Anki is just... word. think. click. feedback. repeat. repeat. repeat 200 times. repeat tomorrow.

You can do the whole thing with the space bar and 1-4 on your keyboard.

You can make yourself do that, but be wary of it souring you on the language or burning out.

> Nuenki is pretty much what I was looking for - plus it's a good shove to make switch from Safari to Firefox

I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback etc.

I'd like to add Safari support, but Apple makes it pretty difficult to publish as someone who doesn't have a Mac or lots of money to spend.

Good luck with your German!

I didn't know that! Thank you. I've always heard "Hochdeutsch" used to describe the "standard form" (based on German German) online. I stand corrected.

I haven't used Anki for a while now. I've had an aversion to it since I completely burnt out after my A levels.

I primarily added Anki cards from Obsidian. I'd have a heirarchal note structure for the subject (e.g. physics -> paper 3 -> astrophysics -> stars -> star type categories). Then I'd have my plainly-formatted notes, and below it I'd have some flashcards. The Obsidian4Anki extension let me create cards from the markdown.

The cards would strictly be on the topic in the note, generally be written around the same time or a few days later, and would be Q-and-A or clozes.

So as an example, "What colour is an O class star::Blue" would be in my notes and turned into a matching card, or "A {1:type 1A supernova} always has an {2:absolute magnitude} of {3:-19.3}" would create three cloze cards.

At the top of each note I'd use a note property to specify the notes' place in the Anki heirarchy, and I'd use the first three parts of the Obsidian heirarchy. So I'd save it as Physics -> Paper 3 -> Astrophysics -> [many, many cards]. I always duplicated notes to make new ones, so I rarely touched this.

Generally I'd practice all the physics cards at once, but categorising them this way let me drop the paper 1 cards once I'd done it and focus on paper 2 and 3 etc.

Honestly, though, I first started this when I was fourteen. My notes and my Anki decks were a complete mess compared to when I stopped when I left school four years later. You'll find what works for you - and clean things up - as you go along.

r/languagelearning and r/german have some good advice in their wikis.

You'll find a lot of people encouraging comprehensible input, where you try to receive as much German as possible while understanding about ~90% of it and letting your brain kinda "work it out" the "natural" way.

It's quite cool, and I've made a tool built around it (https://nuenki.app, which selectively translates websites to give you comprehensible input as you browse the web). I'd recommend pairing it with other methods - Anki is effective but miserable, and proper grammar reading (the subreddit has some good links) can have a very high ROI.

I quite like the Easy German youtube channel. They have some clips from Austrians - and that's something to bear in mind, as Austrian German and Swiss German are quite different to the High German ("Hochdeutsch") (edit: see the reply; I'm wrong here) you'll generally be taught.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzv_FDh4N2o

That's an excellent way to put it. Personally, it allowed me to get excellent grades despite my post-concussion syndrome. It's miserable, but optimising your learning can really let you punch above your weight.

Also, you can fit Anki into parts of your day where "proper" learning is more difficult. I used to do it on the bus to and from school, where it was far to loud - and I was often too tired - to learn through other means.

The alternative was scrolling through HN... I did that a lot, too.

As far as I know, launching on new, unproven rockets tends to be a lot cheaper. E.g. the Escapade mission launching on New Glenn.

Actual r1 is a base model by Deepseek with CoT added by them via RL.

The distillations are other people's base models with RL used to add CoT to them. The 70b one is Llama that Deepseek has modified.

As I understand it.

I have a lot of trouble on airplanes. How did you learn to do that?

You'd be better off asking on https://www.reddit.com/r/buildmeapc/ . Make sure you include a budget; "fairly cheap" varies wildly. Or ask for the minimum spec that can run at [resolution/framerate/with or without mods]. Whether you're open to second hand parts is also useful.

I've added it.

https://nuenki.app :)

Does the change correlate with COVID? You might have long COVID brain fog.

Aside from that, this is quite an interesting read as someone with post concussion syndrome. That largely recovered in time.

I've found that going outside, taking a break, and going for a walk helps my symptoms. Lifting weights helps, too, and the modern treatment regimes (not that I followed them; my doctors misled me) emphasise cardiovascular exercise.

Maybe avoid LLMs for a while. They're incredible tools, but I find they encourage intellectual laziness.

Perhaps you have ADHD?

I do the same. There's also the bonus that, even if you want to quickly remove the block, it'll take a few minutes to apply unless you go through the bother of wiping the DNS cache.

Sure, I'll add it. It isn't supported by DeepL, so it'd have higher latency (alongside a few other languages that are Claude-only).

I can contact you when it's added, if you like - perhaps you could email alex (at) nuenki.app?

Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback!

There's also https://nuenki.app (disclaimer: I made it), which applies the same approach to every single website*. It translates appropriate-difficulty sentences into your target language, and you can hover for definitions, pronunciations, etc.

*other than those blocked for privacy reasons

Exactly - it works better in the real world, where there's a lot less context than a clinical benchmark, and you're just trying to get the answer without writing an essay.

The way I first learnt.

Scratch from a young age.

codeclub.org Python. Pulling data from APIs and showing it. Using pyautogui to do silly automation. Reading about denial of service attacks from cloud flare blog posts, then googling "send UDP packet python", sticking it in a for loop and a while loop, and crashing the router. Circumventing the school firewall in increasingly elaborate ways.

Subscribing to every computer related subreddit possible and learning through osmosis.

Building things, breaking things, and learning as I go. It's been good fun.

You might be on to something here. Desktop agents that can have a fluid conversation with e.g. blind people about what they're "seeing". I'm not sure you need a special browser, though. Just wait a year!

It hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.

Yeah, Anki is optimised for serious learners who ask "What is the most effective way to learn x"?, while duolingo optimises for fun and engagement.

A lot of people prefer having some fun and learning a bit as they go to going through some rather dull flashcards, even if the latter is technically a lot more time efficient.

I say as someone who's spent hundreds of hours in Anki. It's effective but it's miserable.

I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does.

And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).

So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".

Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.

Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.

Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback.

Yeah, it's been kinda interesting to see the effect of Nuenki actually.

I haven't been doing much proper German studying for a while - partially because I've been focused on Nuenki. However, I've been getting into it again recently, and I'm going to go to a language exchange.

There are a lot of sentences I can intuitively just sorta understand, even if I might not be able to tell you what a certain word or grammatical feature is. I think it's quite useful for getting you over the mental block of "ah I don't follow it" to getting the gist. I wanted to find something on the German Wikipedia a week ago, and I was able to navigate it as if it were all in English - even though, if you asked me what a specific word meant, I probably wouldn't know.

You definitely need to pair it with something with more active recall, though. My passive vocabulary is much larger than my active one after this break.

> Learn to speak German like a 5 year old

This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".

There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.

I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.

Warp terminal does that. It's cool.