Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users.
Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts.
I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language. The very first items were:
1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better)
2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour
Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting Guten Morgen is wrong, correcting me to Hallo. Then it asked me what Bonjour means again, this time Guten Morgen is correct.
So yeah, good initiative, but please just tell me what it is and don't lie.
They are identified by the question's id. And by the id we find the answer, and this is a bug where we show you one of the Bonjours, and only one of the answers is right per id. It's just a bug, that we already have mechanics for, but it's not always perfect. The course is still tested by linguists and native speakers.
But sorry, I do not believe your last sentence. German-French should be a popular pair, and you yourself claimed to speak both languages. This happened literally in the first beginner lesson. Everyone with most basic knowledge of the languages would catch that. This wouldn't even be a big deal if you'd communicate openly. This is a problem especially as you take money for the service after the free tier.
I'm no German speaker, but I'm French, and without invalidating your initial claim (about the AI generated stuff), in France we do translate "good morning" by "Bonjour", which literally means good (bon) day (jour).
Any other translation would be weird: if you'd translate "good morning" by "Bonne journée" -> that would be super weird, because this is something one could say in France to say "Goodbye" xD
I lived in Germany for a short time back in 2022, and notice that saying "Hallo" is used a little bit everywhere. However I can tell you that you are NOT supposed to say "salut" in France ANYWHERE except with your friends.
Like, imagine, you're in Germany you enter a bakery, you can say "Hallo" -> no problem. Same situation in France and you say "Salut" -> either people will react badly or assume that you don't know French or maybe they'll think you're impolite for no reasons
Bonjour for good morning is correct. The problem is that the app introduced it to me like this:
"A in German means Z in French. B in German also means Z in French. Here is the word Z without any context. What's the correct word in German? You can choose between A, B, C and D. B is wrong, I wanted A".
I can imagine that they have direct mappings between the words, without checking for collisions. Even that could be fine, if the frontpage didn't claim this was "curated by experts" and it didn't happen literally in the first lesson haha.
I’m a trust-but-verify kind of person, and I can’t find a single mention of any language-learning facilities, academies, linguists, native speakers, or anything else that would corroborate this.
Sounds like the author unwittingly taught you the first lesson. :)
Edit: clarification
You say you learned Turkish with lairner. What level of fluency did you achieve? Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension?
Edit: I'm not trying to be argumentative, I see a lot of people come on Show HN with these fantastic projects but are poorly marketed. You seem to have some differentiator but I'm not seeing it in action. I wish you the best success with this, and I can assure you, if it's as good as you say I will be your biggest customer and fan.
Only a very small percentage of people that learn a language that is not their native language can achieve that.
Source: native English speaker in Europe. I have to explain/reword several words/expressions per day to people who would be by all means considered fluent.
(all numbers in this comment were estimated based on experience)
Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.
And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%.
Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension.
I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency".
Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?
> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.
I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?
This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)
So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)
Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!
If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.
I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.
However, the app exists ... and it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Funny vibe code glitche in how an excersirce gives away the answer in a transaction of each question.
First question: Wie steht es um Ihr Greek?
Greek is obviously the english and not the german name of the language. But "Wie steht es um Ihr Griechisch?" wouldn't be grammatically correct either.
It's an absolute disaster in both romanization of Khmer characters and pronounciation. Simple words like 'arkun' are pronounced _very_ incorrectly and the romanization is incomprehensible.
I'm interested. What's the fundamental difference here, that actually pushes you to learn the language in a useful way?
I mean, "effort" to me in this context is what the creator of $project thinks it is worth their time. Don't you agree? If you want to learn a new computer language yourself, vibecoding will probably not help you. If you want to create something to scratch your itch, and spend time and mental effort in getting it polished, isn't that effort? It is not automatic, even with vibecoding, getting out a good app/site that solves a need in an elegant, functional manner for the user.
This feels like a vibecoded comment.
To address the "substance" of your "comment": yes, creating a polished product requires effort, but this is not a polished product: as pointed out by numerous commenters, it provides nothing new, and what it does provide is broken. Thus the GP's comment that it is vibecoded slop and not worth taking seriously.
It doesn't matter, the answer is the same. Using vibecoding is less effort that not using it, so of late we see a lot of low-effort vibecoding projects, of which this is one. Ergo, vibecoding is an easily-spotted red flag for projects that are not worth taking seriously.
> I would ask you to be more mindful in your replies.
You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
And the whole point of my initial reply was to question the definition of "effort".
> You should take your own advice. Also, don't be a dick.
I think your reply perfectly illustrates the situation.
Not a fruitful discussion anyway, enjoy clicking down arrows.
If vibe coding would lower cost while maintaining quality then this would be a fair argument, but the reality is that its a lazy way and frankly it's not programming.
Thanks for all the feedback, this filled up our backlog for surely a few weeks.
Some questions:
"Listen to authentic native pronunciation in every lesson. Learn the correct accent and intonation from day one."
Can you elaborate on what this means? I currently speak Portuguese (Brazilian) and Italian. While the Italian audio seems fine, the Brazilian portuguese audio is not very good. It seems to be using Portugal's portuguese. And it doesn't sound "native". The audio for single words specially is not something I would recommend to anyone learning portuguese.
The landing page also makes these marketing claims but doesn't go further into any of them:
- "Our proven algorithm tracks every word you learn". Do you follow any learning methodology? What has been "proven" about your algorithm? Are their some stats?
- "Engage in dynamic lessons designed by language specialists." Who are you language specialists that have "carefully designed lessons"?
The one thing you have going for you is that I didn't have to give you my email to get started but the landing page doesn't give me any confidence that this app is better than Duolingo or other language apps.
On Russian, the explanations of why some answers were correct/incorrect didn't load (presumably an AI call failed?). Especially at lower layers, a good fallback would be a simple dictionary definition.
On Spanish, I did the placement test, then it asked which "dialect" I wanted. I selected Mexican, and was treated with truly excellent renderings of European pronunciation. I wouldn't have been mad if all it had was one set of pronunciation, and it's more frustrating to see the ignored option than to never have it at all.
As for the placement test: I got dropped into lesson 2 for Spanish. For comparison, I placed into Lesson 5 in Russian, where I actually got more incorrect answers. The Spanish placement test wasn't very deep, and I knew all the answers. It told me I got two wrong, so either the test is wrong or I just got punchy and hit the wrong buttons.
Recommendation: scale back on the ambition. Focus on getting the educational and product experience right with languages you know first. Be honest about data provenance and limitations.
1. I selected "advanced level" for my target language. I expected real sentence. Instead I got a lot of "I am American" and "He is tall" type sentences.
2. In some cases when I was asked to select the word to complete the sentence, multiple options could be correct, but only one was recognized as correct by the program. Concretely, the format was "He is ______" and the possible solutions were "that" "Indian" "American" "comes from" and "French". Three of those options are perfectly grammatical, but only "French" was marked correct.
3. No offense, but this all has the hallmarks of AI slop, which I consider to not be an appropriate way to develop language learning tools, especially at an above-beginner level. Each language has different structures and complications and requires attention to different aspects of the language.
4. Above all, this app does not appear to differ from Duolingo in any substantial way, except that it's worse. If you're going to boast that your app is better than Duolingo, you should substantiate that with a concrete argument. Certainly Duolingo is highly flawed, above all in its total absence of formal grammar instruction which is something that even an AI-generated app should be able to do.
It doesn't seem to have any theme for each lessons either, which is my major bugbear about the new duolingo. (its really obvious in the more well loved languages like spanish)
I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.
The problem is there, but a tool is just not the solution. The solution is to actually put in the elbow grease and learn what you need/want to learn.
Apps need to be dopamine fueled to work, and no one has fixed this problem yet.
It's not a waste of time if one enjoys it. Not everyone has the same goals, and Duolingo proves that a great many people enjoy their model.
Also the poster was clearing trying to say "If that is there goal, they are wasting their time." Why misconstrue them so heavily?
How do you prevent gullible users from wasting their time and money on the app rather than learning languages?
From your testimonial that you learned Turkish do you at all mean to imply that a user of your app will have a higher chance of learning Turkish than if they didn't use the app vs say a conversation partner?
Why sell an ineffective product when a more effective one is free?
To quote you "I'm not going to pretend this replaces living in a country or having a conversation partner." This sounds like you believe a simple telephone call is superior to your app. If so why create it? Did you consciously decide to pray on socially anxious people or are you just following other apps blindly?
70+ languages and 700+ courses would imply a staff of people were required to create something like this (if it's of any quality), but it's a "side project"?
Strains credulity.
Plus it would be awesome to get more Maltese learners. I have no one to gush about this language with :D
Have you been to Malta?
Actually to be completely honest, I learned about Maltese, checked my app, and saw it supported Maltese. That night I was learning a language with an app I'd previously built without even knowing the language existed. That's what started my obsession with it.
Then turns out it's an island in an awesome location with an even cooler history. And it uses the letter Ħ
What made you start learning Maltese?
Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.) As a long-time Japanese learner I knew which to expect would be expected as the answer, but a novice would not and it would be just frustrating.
Another was a whole question spoken out loud, but just 1 word from the question as an answer. It can be used like that, but it's asking a lot for a learner to get through it. It's like asking, "Okay?" when you mean "Are you okay?" and expecting a learner to figure it out.
I'm not really sure who this is for. It doesn't seem to fit well for beginner, intermediate, or advanced learners. Beginners need more basic info and explanation. Intermediates probably need things that are more topical. Advanced users probably need things that are more... Well, advanced.
The UI also hanged the browser for full 5 seconds in places.
Though I do think there is vast potential for such things, it needs to be approached judiciously.
Duolingo (at least for the same language) has correct pronunciation and grammar/words, even if it's not a good way to learn.
If I were fine with AI, I could just prompt the LLM myself to create a course perfectly catered to me. Why would I need you? Because your prompting skills are magic? Yeah, no. That is like charging for google search results because you searching skills are so great.
The whole problem with Duolingo is that it got so much worse once they started using AI. Switching to another AI driven project would be out of the frying pan into the fire.
The demo leans heavily on "choose the words for the sentence", which avoids spelling/keyboard issues, and maybe generalizes around the problems of N->N language maps better. The "decoy selection" for multiple choice answers also isn't great - I am getting sentences mixed with numbers for the translation of "three".
It also has the Duolingo-esque audio "reward" sounds. I personally hate them, but a lot of people feel otherwise.