ianjakobs

I can't say I'm familiar with him, but I just had a cursory look and his approach looks interesting (and indeed similar in some regards)! Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks, feel free to let me know what you think!

The service I use for automatic corrections is LanguageTool (https://languagetool.org/), and they support Chinese. It's hard for me to judge the accuracy, but I know that for Spanish it's good at picking up grammar and spelling mistakes.

It's translations, text-to-speech, and corrections. I'm pretty sure the services I currently use support all this, but there's some things built around that such as word counts for the heat map that will need looking into.

I'm certainly interested in adding them though! Will try and look into it soon and let you know.

Also not yet, unfortunately. I wanted to hold off on that until hearing some more thoughts from users.

If you're interested in following along, I try to be open about working on Felingua over on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ianjakobs.

I have no details to share at the moment, but the idea I have now is to at least always keep a free plan available. One option I'm considering is for a potential paid plan to then have more advanced features, such as fully customizable translations.

That said, when that time comes, I believe it only fair to try and keep early users with at least the current functionality available to them.

I understand, and that's a fair point. For cards I went with JSON so that I'm able to add structure to translations, e.g. to show alternative translations and example sentences and highlight certain words.

That said, I do plan on exposing the API and allowing full data exports, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

Definitely! The main reason I haven't yet added support for any of those languages is just that I'm unfamiliar with them, to be honest, as I'd want to make sure they're _fully_ supported, both in terms of translations and corrections.

Is there any language in particular you'd like to see added?

Absolutely agree. At the end of the day there's only so much those services can pick up, so at some point you're bound to run into limitations there.

To address this with Felingua I've added in two methods of getting corrections on the pages you write:

  1. Automatically, by using LanguageTool.
  2. Manually, by allow you to request people you know to review.

The former is great for spelling mistakes or simple grammatical errors, but the latter is where you'll eventually get the most out of once you're at more of an advanced level. I haven't found any service yet that can substitute that.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts if you decide to give it a try!

Creator here. As I’m currently learning Spanish, I started reading the Harry Potter books out loud to my partner (a native speaker) a while ago to get exposed to new vocabulary and practice my pronunciation. From this, I then wanted to review those new words as flashcards, and I also discovered I enjoy writing brief summaries afterwards to practice actively producing content without the time pressure I might have when speaking. I built Felingua to help me with that, with the current main features being:

  1. Write pages in the language you’re learning and look up translations without having to switch context
  2. Get feedback on your writing automatically with suggestions on grammar and spelling and ask a person you know to correct it
  3. Create cards both from corrected text and translations and review them with spaced repetition to learn from your mistakes and expand your vocabulary

Happy to hear your thoughts or answer any questions!

13" for me. It's the sweet spot between it being portable enough to travel with or use while sitting on the couch but still having enough to comfortably work with. And then I have an external monitor at my desk for when I'm working. Those rumors about the MacBook Pro 14" would only improve it since the device size itself is supposed to keep the same footprint.

I had a 15" before this, and it's considerably more annoying to take with you. You might also be less flexible in terms of where you'll work from, e.g. if the table space is limited such as at coffee shops.

Great reads, thanks for posting. I've very recently been inspired to start being more open about my projects, so it's good to have a few more real-life examples of others doing it.