[HN Gopher] Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
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Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
Hi HN! I have been working on a webapp to keep learning German and
today I want to share the first version. In the past, I have used
books with "Short stories" to learn the language and I always
wanted more stories so I thought I could put that into an app.
Short stories are nice because the learner can attempt to
understand words from the context of the text and it feels like
less effort than a traditional language app. Additionally, the app
format allows for practice questions at the end and you can use
LLMs to check whether the answers are correct; so the users can
check themselves. So this is that! Let me know if you have any
questions. https://webbu.app/german
Author : fersarr
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-04-26 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webbu.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (webbu.app)
| [deleted]
| uvbu wrote:
| Looks cool! Though, I'd like to note that the fisherman story is
| not only unidiomatic German, but also contains a bunch of
| mistakes
| fersarr wrote:
| Thank you for having a look! Sorry about the issues with the
| fisherman story, I'll ask my native friend to help improve it.
| Hopefully I'll get better at this!
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Intermediate German student here. I haven't studied German in
| about seven years. I found the example story surprisingly easy to
| understand. I wonder if that's because it was generated by an
| LLM, which is mostly trained on English and is generating,
| basically thinly veiled English story in German.
|
| I know I've seen a lot of complaints on the Latin sub Reddit
| about GPT generating really bad English sounding Latin.
|
| However, for learners coming from English, this may actually be a
| benefit as you can get exposed to reading way faster. And
| ultimately reduce the time until you can read Kafka and Goethe...
|
| Bravo!
| fersarr wrote:
| Interesting point! I asked had a German native to go over the
| text but it will definitely be something I keep an eye on from
| now on. Thank you for checking it out!
| birdstheword5 wrote:
| I think this is a really cool idea and would be something I would
| use. Is there some way to translate short phrases like "drehte
| sich um" all together rather than word by word?
| codethief wrote:
| +1 One could display a small context menu with a "Translate"
| button whenever the user selects text. (Similarly to the "Share
| this on Twitter/Facebook/... menu on Medium".)
| fersarr wrote:
| yea that would work :)
| fersarr wrote:
| Nice to hear that and thanks for trying it! About the
| translations, you are right, that would be better! I will work
| on that!
| bluGill wrote:
| readlang already has that feature. Works someone different from
| this site, but might be what you need.
| curiousfab wrote:
| That would be really helpful because taken out of context,
| single words translated to English will often produce very
| confusing results. My suggestion would be to ditch the google
| links and provide a properly translated version that is
| revealed when hovering over a word/phrase. Such a translation
| could be crowd sourced.
| fersarr wrote:
| Yea, I can definitely improve that! That sounds like better
| way to do it. Thanks!
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Or, ask an LLM to give glosses. You can tap to get a gloss
| in English. (Or other languages later.)
|
| GPT-3.5 is already very good at sense disambiguation
| clbrmbr wrote:
| GPT-4 Prompt: Please assist with providing English
| glosses for a German text. For phrases which are not
| easily interpreted word-for-word, please provide a gloss
| for the whole phrase. Otherwise, provide a gloss for each
| word. You may output the glosses as a list, one gloss per
| line, german on left, followed by an arrow (-->), and
| then the english gloss.
|
| Here's some of the output:
|
| Es --> It
|
| war --> was
|
| ein --> a
|
| sonniger --> sunny
|
| Tag --> day
|
| im --> in the
|
| Wald --> forest
|
| und --> and
|
| ein --> a
|
| Madchen --> girl
|
| namens --> named
|
| Lisa --> Lisa
|
| ging --> went
|
| spazieren --> for a walk
|
| Sie --> She
|
| horte --> heard
|
| plotzlich --> suddenly
|
| ein --> a
|
| Gerausch --> noise
|
| und --> and
|
| drehte --> turned
|
| sich --> herself
|
| um --> around
|
| I was expecting "drehte sich um" to be grouped together,
| but I'm pleased with the glosses.
|
| Note how "sich" is glossed with "herself". That's
| understanding the context properly. Much more useful than
| a dictionary definition of "sich". Similar for "sonniger"
| which Google translated as "sunnier" out of context.
|
| EDIT: Note that GPT-3.5 gave me exactly the same glosses.
| wwilim wrote:
| I like the google translate powered click-to-translate, truly the
| best kind of low-effort functionality.
|
| You can get even more bang for buck if you add a dropdown at the
| top to select the target language - you will now support learners
| from every country in the world in 3h of work tops =)
| fersarr wrote:
| Yea hopefully I can add a few more languages soon!
| okeuro49 wrote:
| Personally I found German texts on the Kindle invaluable, with
| the auto dictionary lookup.
|
| Erich Kaestner and Hans Fallada were my favourites as they used
| an easy/journalistic style.
| ignite wrote:
| I've always enjoyed using comics when getting started with a
| language, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, etc. Short, limited
| vocabulary, visual cues, and I'm frequently familiar with the
| original.
| phyrex wrote:
| IDK if it got hugged to death, but I'm unable to load stories
| from the archive
| fersarr wrote:
| Yea, sorry about that! It was a spike in traffic and my server
| was too small. It's back on now.
| tlhunter wrote:
| I taught myself some German by translating Die Bruders Grimm
| stories word by word, writing between the lines. Combined with
| other learning sources it seemed to work okay.
| phyrex wrote:
| "Die Bruder Grimm" ;) A lot of those stories aren't written in
| contemporary German and would sound very weird if you used it
| in your day to day language.
| Suppafly wrote:
| so to make it plural, you just change the u to a u?
| bloak wrote:
| Yes, but there are only about 24 German nouns that form
| their plural just by adding two little dots like that
| (Umlaut). Four of them mean close relatives and are
| recognisable to English speakers: Vater, Mutter, Bruder,
| Tochter.
|
| A while ago I came across an ancient copy of "Teach
| Yourself German" printed around the start of the Second
| World War. The very first chapter had a list of those
| German nouns that form their plural just with an Umlaut and
| instructed the reader to learn them. I bet you won't find
| many books published today that start like that. I like to
| think there are still a few people around who learnt German
| by reading that edition, perhaps during an air raid.
| phyrex wrote:
| In this case yes. Not in every case. I don't know if
| there's a rule
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| In most cases for ,,der Bruder", the answer is yes: the
| plural is ,,die Bruder".
|
| But in the dative (Dativ) case where the "brothers" are an
| indirect object, the plural form has a different spelling.
| The singular ,,den Bruder" transforms into ,,den Brudern".
| For example, if you want to say "I gave it to the
| brothers," you can say: ,,Ich habe es den Brudern gegeben".
|
| To figure out the plural forms, I use the online Leo
| dictionary (e.g. at https://dict.leo.org/german-
| english/bruder), which often includes a table icon for
| indicating when the noun endings change in other cases.
|
| For studying plural forms of any noun, you can follow
| general rules for pluralization and individually memorize
| the plural forms of each noun with flashcards. You can also
| read and listen to native content to develop an intuition
| for what sounds right.
| samtho wrote:
| As someone who learned German as a second language (so take
| this with a pinch of salt and feel free that I did this
| wrong/bad), I found older German works useful for the purpose
| of understanding sentence structure and grammatical case.
| Immersion introduces vocabulary and contemporary ways of
| speaking. Stuff like the verb in second position was not
| difficult for me and asking questions by leading with a verb
| is actually still used frequently in English (more so in en-
| GB). Additionally, a number of European languages heavily use
| the verb "to have" in ways similar to each other, where an
| American English speaker may use "to be", or "to do", but the
| one thing that, to this day, I find myself struggling with
| occasionally is the gottverlassen grammatical case.
| [deleted]
| dunham wrote:
| I recall "Von dem Fischer un syner Fru" being particularly
| weird. But there may be be editions that are translated into
| modern German.
| bloak wrote:
| True, but they are beautiful, in my opinion, and if you're
| going to have to spend some time working on a text it helps
| if the text is something that you're willing to spend time
| on. Also, although the "Kinder- und Hausmarchen" use old-
| fashioned language, it's an old-fashioned spoken German,
| which means that in some ways they're closer to modern
| colloquial German than a lot of modern prose. They won't suit
| everyone but I'd definitely recommend that anyone learning
| German give them a try.
|
| If you did want weird, how about learning German from the
| lyrics of Bach cantatas? :-)
| bluGill wrote:
| Every week? you need to supply daily assignments at least. You
| can't learn much with just one study session per week. Maybe you
| can drop down to 5 days per week (weekends off), but the more you
| study the faster you will learn.
| fersarr wrote:
| Ha nice idea! Perhaps I can make it configurable like you are
| saying!
| xhevahir wrote:
| When I was studying German twenty or so years ago I got good
| results from reading lots and lots of children's books, starting
| with the really basic stuff--like books meant for kindergarteners
| --and working my way up to books by Erich Kastner. By grading the
| material in this way you can read a lot without getting tripped
| up by unfamiliar words every sentence.
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| I learned to read German by working through "German for Reading"
| by Karl Sandberg. It's a great book. Work through it a couple
| times until the grammar is second nature, use the Anki deck "4000
| German words by frequency" to increase your vocabulary, and start
| reading children's books (Emil und die Detektive, Max und Moritz,
| u.s.w) then move onto slightly harder books like Kafka's Die
| Verwandlung and Zweig's Schachnovelle.
|
| Max und Moritz is hilarious btw, so don't skip it!
| fersarr wrote:
| Thanks for sharing those resources! I'll have a look
| gdcbe wrote:
| As a Native Dutch speaker that story reads like it's written in
| an alternative ancient Dutch ancestor, very different vind then
| what I usually get from German.
| throwaway2203 wrote:
| I would love this in Egyptian Arabic.
| fersarr wrote:
| Ah sure, I could add that. Would that be learning Egyptian
| Arabic from English?
| codethief wrote:
| +1 for Spanish
| fersarr wrote:
| nice :) it's in the pipeline!
| Gys wrote:
| Portuguese?
| fersarr wrote:
| For sure! if you want drop me an email at <myusername> @
| gmail and I'll let you know when we have spanish and
| portuguese
| fersarr wrote:
| For sure! if you want drop me an email at <myusername> @
| gmail and I'll let you know when we have spanish and
| portuguese
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Native German speaker here. My partner is a native English
| speaker and I was about to recommend this to her.
|
| However, it looks like a lot of this is auto
| generated/translated, making it sound unnatural or sometimes just
| wrong.
|
| For example:
|
| I looked at this example story [1] and the practice question is
| slightly bad grammar. It should be "Wer ging im Wald spazieren?",
| not "Wer ging spazieren im Wald?".
|
| Or: "Sie lachten und hatten eine gute Zeit [...]" --> This seems
| like a bad translation of "had a good time", which doesn't
| translate directly to German like this.
|
| Would definitely not recommend this overall.
|
| [1] https://webbu.app/l/german/story/ein-unerwarteter-
| spaziergan...
| quitit wrote:
| Paired with the autogenerated questions which require upgrading
| to check.
|
| One might as well use Duolingo, they have an interactive story
| feature which I feel does a better job than this (despite how
| poor I believe duolingo is for learning a language.)
| thomasahle wrote:
| Seems silly to translate short stories into German, rather than
| just using German short stories. Even if translation got
| incredibly good, the "real" German stories would have the extra
| benefit of teaching you about the culture.
|
| On that note, do you have a recommendation for a collection of
| actual German short stories?
| ainar-g wrote:
| Not exactly stories in text, but there is a YouTube channel
| called "Deutsch Lernen Durch Horen"[1] ("Learning German
| Through Listening"), which has hundreds of stories for all
| levels.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@DldH
| WalterBright wrote:
| Der Struwwelpeter
| verst wrote:
| Excellent recommendation. I always use that book to explain
| to people how I grew up very differently from folks in the
| US (where I now live).
|
| English: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24571
|
| German:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24571/24571-h/24571-h.htm
| guenthert wrote:
| My sarcasm detector is failing me. Mid 19th century
| Germany (around the time the Struwwelpeter was written,
| that would have been the Deutscher Bund, when nationalism
| was seen as progressive) is culturally, sociologically
| more different from late 20th century Germany then late
| 20th century Germany from late 20th century USA methinks.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I started watching German television on YouTube a couple
| years ago and had a very eerie feeling when I discovered
| the ZDF Heute Show and Harald Schmidt's show (modeled
| after the Daily Show and David Letterman, respectively).
| It might seem trite to point out a couple of television
| shows, but it was certainly a surprise to me. Do you
| think the similarity owes more to US involvement in post-
| war reconstruction or general globalization?
|
| One of the things I like about the Heute Show is that the
| gags often point at some cultural thing I knew nothing
| about (in fact, I think it was one of those gags that led
| me to reading Stuwwelpeter in the first place).
| Similarly, I encountered something last week that
| prompted me to read Max und Moritz. So I assume these
| things still have cultural relevance, even if as a sort
| of short-hand, but I certainly see your point (edit: at
| least superficially).
| guenthert wrote:
| In the aftermath of WW2, it surely was the post-war
| reconstruction (in what became West Germany at least).
| Later on, US cultural exports from Disney to Mc Donalds
| dominated. Hollywood, satellite t.v. and now the WWW have
| major influences (cue "Amerika" by Fee). Germany isn't a
| small US, there remain significant differences (for the
| better or worse), but travelling (later immigrating) from
| Germany to US, the latter seemed eerily familiar and
| strange at the same time.
|
| I'd wager that kids in Germany today (or for the last 40
| years or so) can relate more to Tom Sawyer and
| Huckleberry Finn than to Struwwelpeter, not the least
| because the former was made into a (quite well done) t.v.
| show dubbed and broadcast in Germany.
| verst wrote:
| German parenting is very different from American
| parenting. Struwwelpeter is an extreme, but it does
| capture the essence of the tough love approach, emphasis
| on following rules (or suffer the consequences) etc
|
| Certain elements of German culture did not just develop
| in the last 150-200 years :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Extreme? I read it when I was 6 or 7, and was amused by
| it. I have a number of books that are inappropriate for
| children, but Struwwelpeter isn't one of them.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I'd call cutting a child's thumbs off as a punishment for
| sucking on them pretty extreme. Or being burnt alive for
| playing with matches. And yes, I'm German.
| [deleted]
| verst wrote:
| Exaggerated might be a better word. It is stories meant
| to educate kids on proper behavior. The consequences
| shown in Struwwelpeter are just empty threats parents
| make - but depicted in that book.
|
| I also read it at age 6 or so.
|
| Many American parents would find it inappropriate for
| kids given how graphic and negative it is. I think it is
| a classic however.
| yorwba wrote:
| The Struwwelpeter continues to be part of German culture.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| not a collection, but Heinrich Boll, _An der Brucke_ , is one
| of my favourite shorts in any language.
| thayne wrote:
| I suspect these might be generated by chatgpt or similar.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I think this can be solved through asking the LLM to improve
| the output itself. I asked GPT-4 to "provide more idiomatic and
| grammatically correct versions. Consider whether each phrase
| sounds like German," and got the following output:
|
| Wer ging im Wald spazieren?
|
| Max war sehr dankbar fur Lisas Hilfe und lud sie zum Eisessen
| ein. Sie gingen zu einer nahegelegenen Eisdiele und verbrachten
| den restlichen Tag zusammen. Sie lachten und hatten eine schone
| Zeit, als ob sie sich schon lange gekannt hatten.
|
| @cloogsicer: is "eine schone Zeit" more acceptable? The rest?
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I tried the first paragraph, too. Seems to have made several
| idiomatic improvements:
|
| Es war ein sonniger Tag im Wald und ein Madchen namens Lisa
| ging spazieren. Sie horte plotzlich ein Gerausch und drehte
| sich um. Sie sah einen Jungen namens Max, der in
| Schwierigkeiten war. Er hatte sich verlaufen und wusste
| nicht, wie er zuruck zum Parkplatz kommen sollte. Lisa
| entschied sich, ihm zu helfen und sie begannen gemeinsam den
| Weg zuruck zu suchen.
|
| -->
|
| Es war ein sonniger Tag im Wald, und ein Madchen namens Lisa
| ging spazieren. Plotzlich horte sie ein Gerausch und drehte
| sich um. Sie sah einen Jungen namens Max, der in
| Schwierigkeiten steckte. Er hatte sich verirrt und wusste
| nicht, wie er zum Parkplatz zuruckkommen sollte. Lisa
| beschloss, ihm zu helfen, und gemeinsam suchten sie den Weg
| zuruck.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| I learned more from comparing these two paragraphs than
| from reading the original.
|
| Little things like where the comma goes, sich verlaufen vs
| sich verirren.
|
| Ich soll mehr mit le Chat auf deutsch quatschen.
| thanatropism wrote:
| This can also be solved picking a copy of Goethe's Faust in
| German. It's an entertaining story.
| yorwba wrote:
| I'd use ,,hatten viel Spass zusammen" instead of ,,schone
| Zeit".
| fersarr wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I'm going to be working on improving
| this so hopefully It will be up to your standards very soon. I
| do have some ideas to check and the comments from today helped
| a lot. Also, I'll ask my native friends for some help.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| TornadoGuard: https://xkcd.com/937/
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Clicking on the words launches new tabs/windows into Google for
| translation. Very annoying. sending me to Google as a search link
| is super annoying. Some words (e.g., war, Tag, um) are not only
| in German, so the translations can be confusing.
|
| Translation can be done prior to displaying the story, and make
| the words appear as hover boxes, and even provide more language
| context.
|
| The example story is asking me to log in and subscribe to get a
| full demo. A demonstration in my mind supposed to demonstrate how
| the system works prior to commitment.
|
| I am unable to provide you free QC/QA because I would have to
| give you my email.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I had exactly the same thought about the new tab. Kindles and
| OSX devices (among others) can already give an intrusive popup
| with a translation or definition.
|
| I'm an intermediate German speaker and even to me the language
| in the example story felt weird. I'm totally into the idea, and
| if the usability was better I'd probably use the site despite
| the non-idiomatic text.
| fersarr wrote:
| Thanks @WaitWaitWha and @y_y! I definitely want to improve
| that and have the translations on the same page! Hopefully
| very soon :) thanks for trying it out.
| Tepix wrote:
| There's a mistake in the first paragraph of the story i checked:
|
| Heute, viele Jahre spater, hatte er seine eigene kleine
| Fischerboote
|
| _kleinen_
| lispm wrote:
| eigenen kleinen
| fersarr wrote:
| ah, thanks you two (tepix and lispm)! I'll fix it up!
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/qqxr7JY just to let you know, sometimes the
| translation is in the wrong direction when I click on words.
| fersarr wrote:
| ah! I will fix that, thanks!
| NotHereNotThere wrote:
| The link translates from English to Japanese for me ;)
| kreas wrote:
| This is off to a great start. I've been studying German through
| various methods for around 3 years now. Mostly as a mental
| exercise but also because I love German television.
|
| For me, reading has been one of most productive ways to learn.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| can you recommend any German shows? thanks!!
| schroeding wrote:
| (All non-amazon links will probably require a German IP / VPN
| - you may find those shows on other streaming platforms, too)
|
| Stromberg - German adaptation of The Office, but Bernd
| Stromberg (aka Micheal Scott / David Brent) is a bit of an
| asshole this time and it's not a paper company, but an
| insurance company.
|
| https://www.amazon.de/Stromberg-Staffel-2/dp/B00ERLPUNA
|
| Tatort - mostly serious show about police solving murders,
| produced by all of the local public broadcasters, e.g. there
| are Tatorts from Cologne, Munster, Munich, each using the
| regional dialect. "Polizeiruf 110" is the version of the ex-
| GDR, it works the same way. The Munster-Tatort is quite
| funny:
|
| https://www.ardmediathek.de/sammlung/tatort-folgen-mit-
| thiel...
| https://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/krimi/tatort/index.html
|
| Tatortreiniger - a show about a crime scene cleaner in weird
| situations. If you know "The Cleaner" from the BBC: This is
| the original show it's based upon. The main character uses a
| northern german / Hamburg dialect.
|
| https://www.ardmediathek.de/serie/der-
| tatortreiniger/staffel...
|
| Hubert und Staller - show about incompetent bavarian rural
| police solving murders, heavy focus on comedy, bavarian
| dialect. The first few seasons are quite funny, the later
| ones are meh.
|
| https://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/serie/hubert-und-
| stalle...
|
| Unsere Mutter, unsere Vater - "Generation War" outside of
| Germany, mini-series about a group of friends and their roles
| in WW2.
|
| https://www.amazon.de/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.9aab6ee1-.
| ..
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| I liked: Turkisch fur Anfanger, Dark, Kleo, ans Stromberg.
| Unfortunately I'd say IMHO if you're accustomed to US series
| you won't find a lot of German ones that stand up to the
| production values and acting quality. Dark is a notable
| exception there I think.
| bloak wrote:
| Yes, but "Dark" (Netflix) doesn't have a lot of words
| spoken per hour, as I recall, so perhaps it's not so good
| for language learning. There's also "Beat" (Amazon) with a
| somewhat gruesome main storyline.
|
| If you wanted to get linguistically flummoxed there's
| "Capitani" on Netflix. (A great story, but it's in
| Luxembourgish!)
| piceas wrote:
| Mord mit Aussicht
| lb1lf wrote:
| Dark was terrific. Time travels and parallel worlds.
| Deutschland '83 (in particular) but also '86 and '89 were
| quite decent - about a young German becoming a Stasi
| superagent of sorts.
|
| Oh, and while you're at it, get Das Boot if you haven't
| already, also available as a TV miniseries.
|
| As for movies, you could do a lot worse than picking up a few
| Wim Wenders movies - say, Der Himmel uber Berlin or Alice in
| den Stadten.
|
| Oh, if you pick up Der Himmel uber Berlin, consider picking
| up In weiter Ferne, so nah! as well. Same universe, but more
| run-of-the-mill than Himmel uber Berlin, which is probably
| the most poetically beautiful movie I have ever seen.
| fersarr wrote:
| Nice ones! I also enjoyed some of those. Would also add to
| the list: biohackers, We Children from Bahnhof Zoo,
| barbaren, and maybe dogs of berlin.
| nickybuzz wrote:
| This is awesome! I've been casually learning German for 200+ days
| now, so this will make a great addition to my practice. Are the
| short stories generated by LLMs too?
| fersarr wrote:
| Nice to hear! I'm in the same position! Trying to keep it going
| and to find new ways to keep it interesting.
| amitheonlyone wrote:
| I am experiencing an issue where if you click a word to get
| translation, a new Google search with 'translate "war" to
| english' opens. The problem is that it doesn't try to translate
| from German. Instead it translates the English word 'war' to
| Latin for some reason. I think a better search keyword is
| 'translate "war" from german to english'
| amjd wrote:
| Experiencing the same issue. Google is falling apart. It's
| choosing English as the source language with queries like this,
| and destination is any language which you may have used
| recently with translate.
|
| A note to the OP:
|
| translate "Fischerboote" to english - doesn't work
|
| translate "Fischerboote" from german - works
| fersarr wrote:
| Yep you are totally right, will make those changes and maybe
| try to have the translation on the same page! Thanks for the
| feedback!
| fersarr wrote:
| You are right, that would be better, I will improve the search
| query. Also I'll try to have that on the actual page so that
| it's a better experience. Thanks for the feedback.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| If this is using LLMS then it would be great to expand to as many
| languages as possible because anthing outside of large languages
| are very poorly served by existing language learning apps. Danish
| (from english) would be my preference, but I imagine you could
| have a user configurable pair (I understand the situation is
| much, much more dire if you don't even presently understand a
| large language english,spanish,chinese etc)
| fersarr wrote:
| Yes! I would love to expand to more languages! I am
| prioritizing the ones I understand otherwise it becomes really
| hard ha. So, yeah, I will add more languages :)
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Hey this is really a great project! Thanks for sharing. Any
| thoughts on expanding to other languages?
| fersarr wrote:
| Hey! Yes, definitely! I will be adding more very soon. Which
| one are you looking for?
| Tade0 wrote:
| I struggled with German in middle school because it was the only
| foreign language available there and I wanted to hone my English
| instead.
|
| Ultimately what helped me to pass were dubbed animated series
| like The Simpsons. Live action stuff usually had too much
| background noise for me to follow properly.
| fersarr wrote:
| Hopefully we can add something closer to that experience at
| some point too.
| monksdream wrote:
| I have found ChatGPT a great tool for that sort of task (I study
| French).
|
| A typical book meant for students trying to improve their reading
| skills usually starts from a certain level which is fairly high
| for me currently.
|
| By using an LLM you can tailor-make a story i.e. define your
| level ("Give me a short story in French, for someone with very
| limited vocabulary" or "for a seven-year old") and then adjust
| accordingly if it's too easy/hard, ask to use only grammar you
| have studied ("only using present tense"), pick a familiar topic
| ("about a someone who studies Physics in college") etc.
| fersarr wrote:
| Great ideas! Will see how it works :) I particularly like the
| idea about "only using X tense"
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I recently started using LingQ for this. It's effortful rather
| than easy, which makes it a bit harder to develop into a habit,
| but the technique seems very effective, and the platform works
| well both when importing content and when studying it.
|
| Maybe you're targeting people who are more casual learners, and
| aren't willing to do stuff that feels hard?
| fersarr wrote:
| Wasn't aware of LingQ, thanks for sharing it. Perhaps you are
| right about the targeting. Casual learners... but also busy
| people that would benefit from the format. We'll see.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "but also busy people that would benefit from the format"
|
| IMO busy people need tools that give the most learning per
| time spent, not tools that feel easy at the expense of pace
| of learning.
|
| These tools tend to require effort (e.g. LingQ, Readlang,
| Language Transfer) rather than ones that feel easy (e.g.
| Duolingo).
| codethief wrote:
| Would it be possible to add different translation engines, like
| DeepL or ChatGPT? (ChatGPT in particular is often much better
| than all the alternatives.)
| fersarr wrote:
| Just to understand, are you imagining the user picking the
| translation engines?
| codethief wrote:
| Maybe, yeah. (Not sure whether it'd be a global setting or
| one would choose every time.) The reason being that
| translation results can vary quite a bit.
| [deleted]
| aimor wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this, I'm trying it out now.
|
| One thing I noticed is that the translation links are auto-
| detecting the language, so some words are assumed by Google to be
| a language other than German.
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