[HN Gopher] Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabul...
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Show HN: Personalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building
Hi! Wanted to share the project I really wanted to have. TLDR; this
app lets you create your own list of words and you get a Duolingo-
like experience (kind of, still needs a lot of features) practicing
those words in their context. My English is not the best but not
the worst either. But I realized I can't boost it up after a
certain level! In my belief, in order to truly learn a language,
you need to be exposed to that language often. Vocabulary is the
key factor here if you really want to improve in any language. My
experience is that when I read a book to improve my English
vocabulary, I encounter words that I don't know so often and my
reading gets disturbed. I go look for the meaning, come back, put
it in context, re-read it, etc. It didn't work for me. So I tried
listening to audiobooks - I listen to the book and read along, and
whenever I encounter a word, I write it down. I get these 50 words
in 2-3 pages and I ask ChatGPT to give me their meanings. I read
them, take the book, and now read it myself. That helps for sure,
but still after a while I lose those words because I never
encounter them again. Well then, in order to not forget those
words, I need some kind of exercise, right? A flashcard app maybe?
Well, I still need to go out there, ask ChatGPT to create
questions, put them in a flashcard app, etc. It's still time-
consuming and this is supposed to be fun! I need to be exposed to
English in my daily life. I just need to save the words somewhere
and whenever I want, I need to be able to practice them in a fun
way, in Duolingo style maybe? So then I realized would it be better
to store words in their own context? I mean, say I read Harry
Potter and have a list of words I encountered in it, say I watch
Breaking Bad and have a list of words I encountered watching it. I
believe seeing those words together and practicing together makes
it easier to remember them. But I shouldn't be the one adding the
meaning of the word and the one to generate exercises, right? It
all should be automated. The exercise part will be handled by LLM
for sure, but for the meaning of the word, I can fetch from a
dictionary? But I really don't like the dictionary definitions and
one word can have multiple meanings in their own context. So then I
need to use LLM for this task too and have the word's meaning in
its own context. You create a list for your context, you add
words, meanings get added automatically, and I see the word added
in a different color (coloring is also a method used to remember
words). It all takes seconds. And whenever I want to practice these
lists, I can use learn mode to learn and test my knowledge in quiz
mode. So I basically built this app ((thanks to Claude 3.5
Sonnet)). I want it to be like Duolingo, but of course I still have
a way ahead to go, but wanted to share it in hopes of getting
contributors. You can read more in the repository. I would love to
get your thoughts on this.
Author : arbayi
Score : 149 points
Date : 2025-01-20 16:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| markvdb wrote:
| Thank you for your contribution to the FOSS learning space.
|
| Here's a few random suggestions: - spaced repetition. Again, anki
| style. - audio. Can you make it easy to record a phrase, anki
| style? Or maybe even make AI pronounce them correctly?
|
| I would something like that.
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you so much! I will definitely add those ideas to the
| roadmap in the README (pointing out this comment).
|
| I believe the spaced repetition feature must be prioritized
| because that's the most important thing in this app. I mean,
| what's the purpose of seeing the words over and over again if I
| already have confidence with them?
|
| For the pronunciation feature, I had similar work before and
| there are great open source tools and libraries we can build
| upon that analyze your pronunciation and spot where you made
| mistakes. We can use open source TTS libraries to pronounce the
| correct version.
|
| I also would definitely want to see audio questions in
| exercises similar to Duolingo, and it would be great to work on
| those features.
| learning-tr wrote:
| I am learning Turkish so I built something like that for me.
| You can highlight any word online and it will translate
| colloquially so you can actually use it irl.
|
| It also has audio and pronunciation. It is around the halfway
| mark in the demo.
|
| demo: https://imgur.com/a/full-demo-so-far-O2fzBJn
| arbayi wrote:
| Harika gorunuyor! Are you planning to share it open source?
|
| Not: Bu benim en sevdigim sarkilardan biridir!! (it's one my
| fav songs)
| nikkwong wrote:
| This looks neat. If you're going to add Duolingo style features,
| please don't add fill-in-the-blank or word matching to the
| question types; or at least make them optional. They are an
| incredibly frustrating waste of time on Duolingo--they take up a
| ton of time to solve and don't actually improve comprehension. My
| biggest gripe with Duolingo is that half of the questions asked
| in a lesson are questions like these which have the pretense of
| helping you learn but don't actually deliver. I think if you
| instead came up with some very difficult question types that
| really challenged someone's comprehension, it would be stickier
| than Duolingo (especially for the HN crowd who is _actually_
| trying to learn) and not just here to "play a game" like a large
| portion of the Duolingo audience.
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you! I am very interested in this project and want to
| keep working on it, hopefully getting help from open source
| contributors.
|
| I actually had this idea of using Duolingo's style exercises,
| but now with your comment, I realize some might not be
| appropriate for individual learners with different goals.
|
| The cool thing would be to have customizable exercise types,
| where users can choose which ones they want and which ones they
| don't want!
|
| I will add this to the roadmap in the README, pointing out this
| comment! Thanks again!
| jghn wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do have any citations on how those exercises
| don't enable learning?
|
| On the latter part, there used to be a hard mode at least in
| browser mode where you could have it force you hand type every
| word. I always really liked that, but then they got rid of it.
| Of course with the heart system these days, I wouldn't last 5
| minutes if I tried to do it that way so such is life I suppose
| frizlab wrote:
| Apologies if this answered in the readme but does this support
| other languages than English?
| arbayi wrote:
| Hi! I actually forgot to mention this in the README, thank you
| for pointing it out.
|
| The app would work for any language, but the definitions and
| exercises will be written in English. I created a list just now
| for German words and added the German word "Zeitreise". It
| generated this definition:
|
| <<"Zeitreise" in a German mystery series means time travel. It
| refers to the act of a character or characters moving through
| time, either to the past or the future, often as a central
| element of the mystery's plot.>>
|
| Exercises were asked in English.
|
| "What does "Zeitreise" mean?":
|
| - Time travel - Train journey - Long wait - Difficult puzzle
|
| Maybe a feature where you can choose the language would be
| cool. I mean, someone might prefer to learn German using
| German, or say Spanish using Turkish.
|
| Again, thank you for pointing it out. I will update the README
| and hopefully add inference language preference feature.
| learning-tr wrote:
| Abi, slick design!
|
| A feature where it supports TR -> EN and vice versa would be
| amazing!
| sebnun wrote:
| Great work, I had a similar need, and built a similar app (using
| podcasts) [1]
|
| I originally planned to add some kind of SRS to it, but I found
| that I learned much better just reading things in context instead
| of explicitly using SRS to memorize them. Steve Kaufmann (creator
| of LingQ) explains this better here [2]
|
| [1] https://www.langturbo.com
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you so much both for your comment and for sharing your
| app! (there are definitely great tools out there that we're not
| aware of) I am very happy to find your app because I actually
| needed something like this! I enjoy listening while working and
| being able to see the transcription alongside it, with word
| definitions in context - this kind of learning really works for
| me! It's fantastic how it supports all those languages - you
| can listen, read, and look up definitions all in one place.
| Looking at this, the one I shared above looked very basic. You
| handle transcription, media playing, testing pronouncation, LLM
| interaction I guess for contextual meaning and examples... !
| The only question I have (sorry if this already exists - but i
| couln't find it) but is there a chance I can see a list of
| words I've encountered and marked as known?
|
| And for the second part, I'm planning to include SRS features
| @markvdb pointed out in comments, combining both contextual
| learning with SRS would be interested I guess.
| claylimo wrote:
| Similar to LingQ there is Migaku which can do this for YouTube
| and other sites. It definitely has significantly aided my
| learning and made it a zero friction and even fun experience to
| learn another language.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| 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
| arbayi wrote:
| I actually want to learn German, but I want to learn it by
| reading German texts and starting from zero, even though
| that makes it challenging. I need to look up definitions
| and such, but translating the entire page defeats the core
| purpose. This app in my case is just perfect match! Thank
| you for sharing!
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback!
| dpig_ wrote:
| Any plans to add Hindi, being the third-most spoken
| language in the world?
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! Looking at their blog, I saw this post
| about learning Japanese vocabulary
| (https://migaku.com/blog/japanese/how-to-learn-japanese-
| vocab...). They share a Japanese Netflix Frequency List -
| (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15b3j9--
| RJ1K5hI9vz_2L...)
|
| "To recognize 99% of all the words in Netflix's subtitles,
| you'd need to know 37,247 words"
|
| Interesting approach! I really don't know how they managed to
| gather this list, but it's an interesting and clever method.
| davidzweig wrote:
| I'll drop this here: If anyone wants to work on Language
| Reactor (well compensated), my email is in my profile. I'm
| planning to start open-sourcing much of it soon.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I built a popular integrated reader and SRS (with Anki
| integration as an alternative option) similar to LingQ but
| focused on Japanese currently
|
| https://reader.manabi.io
| cat_multiverse wrote:
| Hey there, quick suggestion as a PhD Linguistics candidate and
| avid language learner!
|
| The best way I've found to identify vocabulary most important to
| my life is through journaling in the language I'm trying to
| learn. Describing exactly what I did that day, my thoughts, etc,
| as best I can.
|
| I had thought of doing the journal entries digitally and
| gathering dictionary headwords from such journal entries, whether
| they're written in my mother tongue (English) or not, and use the
| built dictionary lists to drill vocab.
|
| Traditionally you'd use a lemmatizer with a morphosyntactic
| tagger for the language to identify the dictionary words, but AI
| is serviceable these days to easily identify dictionary words
| from long-form text in many languages, though honestly would be
| surprised if AI outperforms the traditional methods already.
|
| Good luck and have fun :)
| learning-tr wrote:
| Thoughts on FSI methodology? That's what I used for mine (my
| app).
| cat_multiverse wrote:
| Honestly had never even heard of it! But adult language
| acquisition isn't really a domain of study I've ever been
| interested in. I can only speak to what I have found most
| helpful in my own adult language acquisition journeys. The
| journaling method was taught to me by a polyglot friend of
| mine and it sort of solved the "what actually is my everyday
| vocabulary anyway" side of language learning for me.
| learning-tr wrote:
| tl;dr "The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the primary
| training institution to prepare American diplomats to
| advance U.S. foreign affairs interests, teaching, among
| other things, the languages of the countries where Foreign
| Service Officers will serve. "
|
| Apologies, I should have linked beforehand.
| laurentlb wrote:
| Interesting approach! Thanks for making it open-source, I think
| we need more open-language language learning tools. As I'm also
| building one (https://github.com/laurentlb/lingostories/), I'm
| going to take a look at what you did and the technical decisions.
|
| You seem to focus on the English use-case. In my experience,
| getting exposure to other languages can be much more difficult,
| especially when you're not fluent yet. It would be interesting to
| see how to approach it: ideally, questions and answers should be
| in the target language, but the questions have to be very simple.
|
| As someone else mentioned, having audio would be very useful. At
| some point, you could consider a hand-free mode: it reads the
| question out loud, pauses a few seconds, then tells the response.
| tkgally wrote:
| This looks really good. I wish I had had something like this many
| years ago when I was studying languages.
|
| Somebody has already suggested adding spaced repetition and
| audio, which I agree with completely.
|
| One more suggestion: In addition to having the LLM give you the
| meaning and example for the context in which you originally saw
| the word, also ask it to provide the word's other main meanings
| and examples of it being used in those senses. You might
| encounter a word first in a slang or technical sense; while it's
| useful to learn that meaning, it's also important to learn other,
| more common meanings.
|
| Below are some examples of words you might encounter first in
| technical contexts but would also be worth knowing in their more
| general meanings. (Examples suggested and defined by ChatGPT o1.)
|
| _canonical_
|
| Religious/General: Relating to a canon (e.g., church law) or a
| recognized body of works.
|
| Math/Computing: Conforming to a standard or simplest form (e.g.,
| "canonical form" of an equation).
|
| _resolution_
|
| General: A firm decision or determination (often heard in "New
| Year's resolution").
|
| Tech/Imaging: The detail an image holds, typically measured in
| pixels, dots per inch (DPI), etc.
|
| _protocol_
|
| Diplomatic/General: The official procedure or set of rules
| governing state or ceremonial events.
|
| Computing: A set of conventions and rules for transmitting data
| between electronic devices.
|
| _flux_
|
| General: Continuous movement or change, often implying
| instability.
|
| Physics/Engineering: The amount of some quantity (e.g., heat,
| magnetism) passing through a given area over time.
| PeterSmit wrote:
| I've had this same idea, and it doesn't work. Or at least: it
| works quote well, but the problem is that you get
| hallucinations. And it can be incredibly discouraging to find
| out the flashcards you've been cramming are completlh wrong.
| tkgally wrote:
| What models have you been using for that? While I haven't
| tried automating the production of vocabulary lists through
| an API, within the last few weeks I have had the chat
| versions of ChatGPT 4o, Claude Sonnet 3.5, and one of the
| latest Gemini models produce annotated vocabulary lists based
| on literary texts in English, Russian, and Latin. I didn't
| spot any hallucinations.
|
| I was asking only for the meanings of the words and phrases,
| though. I didn't ask for things like pronunciations,
| grammatical categories, etc. In the past, when I've tried to
| get that kind of granular information from LLMs, there were
| indeed errors, presumably because of tokenization issues.
|
| A few days ago, I ran some similar tests with Japanese,
| asking for readings of kanji and jukugo in an extended text.
| All of the models I had tried before for such tasks had
| screwed up. This time, however, ChatGPT o1 scored 100%. It
| also was able to analyze sentence grammar accurately, unlike
| the other models I tried. I was impressed.
|
| At current API prices, though, o1 might be a bit too
| expensive for such a task.
| arbayi wrote:
| I wonder if there are any benchmarks specifically designed
| to evaluate LLMs' performance in language learning tasks
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| I've had this same problem using ChatGPT and German. Even for
| basic German hallucinations can be unexpected and
| problematic. (I don't recall the model, but it was a recent
| one.)
|
| In one instance, I was having it correct
| akkusativ/dativ/nominativ sentences and it would say the
| sentence is in one case when I knew it was in another case.
| I'd ask ChatGPT if it was sure, and then it would change its
| answer. If pressed further, it would again change its answer.
|
| I was originally quite excited about using an LLM for my
| language practice, but now I'm pretty cautious with it.
|
| It is also why I'm very skeptical of AI-based language
| learning apps, especially if the creator is not a native
| speaker.
| arbayi wrote:
| Would agentic workflows come in handy in these cases? I
| mean having a controller agent after the sentence is
| created, where this agent would be able to search the web
| or have access to a database? or personal notes and ensure
| everything is correct.
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you! I think that would be a good feature. I use the app,
| and it works fine when I add words as I encounter them, but
| when I later revisit the list, I sometimes wish I could see the
| sentences where the word were used (originally) to better
| understand it. Based on your suggestion, having a 'show
| examples' button/link below the meaning would be a cool feature
| to add.
| getwiththeprog wrote:
| From my research, the best language learning program is Anki. It
| is open source and one can make custom 'decks' fairly simply.
| Perhaps a dictionary add-on for Anki would be good idea?
| krowek wrote:
| I think pretty much the same, to the point where I've committed
| to save every sentence seen in Duolingo to make then my own
| Anki deck. I wouldn't bother going back again to Duolingo if I
| already finished the tree and there are no new units for me.
| groggo wrote:
| As someone who's learning a language (french) with Duolingo, and
| also supplementing that with other methods (podcasts, social
| media, online chatting, talking to chatgpt) I've also really
| wanted a way to get duolingo type experience with my own set of
| vocabulary that I encounter. So i'll definitely check this out.
| Also your english is impressive!
| MH4GF wrote:
| This is nice! (100th star I pressed!) I'd like to try it, but the
| setup was a pain, it would be nice to have a button to deploy
| immediately to Vercel and Supabase! ref:
| https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/deploy-button
| codenote wrote:
| I thought it was a great idea! I also often use the Vercel
| Deploy button because it allows me to try things out quickly.
| arbayi wrote:
| Hi!!! Thank you for being the 100th* star and for suggestion!
| I've added this to priority list.
|
| *thanks again!!
| kebsup wrote:
| Great app! I've been building something similar, but for less
| advanced language learners, who wouldn't understand definitions
| in their target language.
|
| My app [1] is basically a combination of SRS flashcards with an
| ebook/YouTube/Website reader. Unlike Anki though, AI creates
| example sentences, definitions, images and audio.
|
| I find it interesting that you want to get inspired by Duolingo.
| My approach is to have the most efficient grind possible - no
| gamification. I've found Duolingo was wasting so much of my time
| with exercises that did not really teach me anything and took a
| long time to complete + the XP points/levels etc. were quite
| distracting.
|
| [1] https://vocabuo.com
| kalido wrote:
| With all the (somewhat competing, though aimed and monetized
| differently) products in this thread, are there any promotions
| in place for extensive testing and comparison?
|
| (E.g., your vocabuo website prominently points to possible
| promo codes.)
| flemhans wrote:
| Is there a "Duolingo" that takes a web site as input and makes it
| into a course? So I could learn by reading e.g. a geeky news site
| in the language to be learned.
| arbayi wrote:
| Would be cool to have such a tool, maybe an extension using
| chrome's built-in AI APIs?
| muth02446 wrote:
| Made something similar for Basic Vocabulary (Spanish and English
| so far):
|
| * https://www.appicenter.net/Apps/VocabES/ *
| https://www.appicenter.net/Apps/VocabEN/
|
| Uses Spaced Repetition and Audio but is not personalized which is
| less of an issue for basic words. The hard part is getting good
| example sentences and "cross links". I had though about use AI
| for that but have not followed through.
| trizoza wrote:
| This is absolutely amazing. Can I check how do you check the
| memorized retention? Are you increasing the period of testing a
| word once it's successfully memorized by doubles, in 1day, in
| 2days, in 4days, 8days, etc.?
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you! The app doesn't have such a feature yet, but I think
| it will be needed eventually, and it has been recommended
| before. I will add this to the roadmap.
| inetknght wrote:
| Some thoughts
|
| I'm on a Duolingo family plan, studying Ukrainian. It keeps
| throwing more and more difficult words without really building my
| knowledge and experience with the previous words.
|
| I'm not sure if I can't hear the words correctly (it's possible,
| I'm partially deaf and it sounds like the voices it provides are
| low quality). I'm not sure if I'm not pronouncing them correctly
| (it often doesn't accept my pronunciations). Its feedback for
| improvement is extremely limited. For example, no matter how hard
| or slow or fast I pronounce it, it pretty much never accepts odin
| ("oden" = "one") when I speak it.
|
| When I was in 3rd through 6th grade of school, I learned English
| pronunciations using Spalding phonetics [0]. There are about 70
| or so English phonemes if I recall. It would be handy to have
| that for other languages. It specifically taught how to put
| letters together to form sounds, and which combinations of
| letters are synonymous for sounds (but not for spelling, which
| was a separate class based much more on memorization of rules and
| exceptions). I excelled in both of these classes.
|
| I've also sometimes asked ChatGPT for translations of words. It
| seems semi-OK. But it's much better to ask Ukrainian friends and
| colleagues. Friends and colleagues don't have a lot of time or
| patience to teach though. And they'd often throw additional
| meaning or context that was difficult to understand (for example,
| English has much less assignment of gender to words).
|
| Not too much later in life (8th grade or so), I started writing
| software. I was homeschooled then, and had _a lot_ of time on my
| hands. So I 'd write software for most of the day every day for
| months at a time. There came a point where I stopped _thinking_
| in English and started thinking in objects and code
| relationships. I didn 't realize it until my mother asked me what
| I was doing and I had to _think_ to translate to English.
|
| I've heard similar anecdotes: you start to become a native
| speaker when you can think in that language. I want that from
| Duolingo but haven't yet achieved it after 2.5 years. I imagine
| what's missing is just as @cat_multiverse said [1]: I don't
| really use the Ukrainian language in my daily life and should
| just start doing so even if it's just a journal. But without any
| feedback about correct pronunciation or grammar I worry that I
| would end up with my own mini language instead of truly a
| Ukrainian one.
|
| [0]: https://spalding.org/
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774032
| agos wrote:
| wait, are you dictating into Duolingo? is it available only to
| some languages?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| It's available in Spanish, on Android, (which is the only
| duolingo permutation I have experience with) and seems to use
| google's speech recognition backend.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _wait, are you dictating into Duolingo?_
|
| Am I dictating insomuch as writing speaking free-form words
| and it writes them down? No.
|
| Duolingo will present a word and ask me to verbalize them
| into the microphone.
|
| Duolingo will present a phrase or sentence and ask me to
| verbalize them into the microphone.
|
| I know that Duolingo will do this also for learning German.
| arbayi wrote:
| Thank you so much to everyone contributing to this thread! I
| learned a lot here just by sharing this - the power of open
| source, I guess! From all those conversations and
| recommendations, I've gathered a list of features that will
| hopefully be built in next coming days:
|
| - A more user-friendly approach to running the app
|
| - LiteLLM integration so we can use any LLM (it's done! thanks to
| @enessusan00!)
|
| - Running the database locally
|
| - Customizable language preferences (e.g., learning German
| through Turkish)
|
| - A live version where anyone can easily try the app
|
| - A protection mechanism for LLM responses to ensure getting
| valid JSON
|
| - Fixing small bugs
|
| - Customizable exercise types (ability to enable/disable specific
| question formats)
|
| We'll be focusing on improving the app as much as we can, but
| help would be greatly appreciated! We'll be structuring the
| repository to make it easier for everyone to contribute together.
|
| I'm truly amazed by all the insights and suggestions shared here.
| There are so many great ideas. Thank you all again for making
| this discussion so enriching and the support. I'll keep sharing
| updates here! All amazing suggestions shared here will be added
| to the roadmap in the README!
| arbayi wrote:
| Here's a list of all the apps (built by them!) mentioned in
| comments:
|
| - LangTurbo (by @sebnun) - langturbo.com : Learn through podcasts
| with transcriptions and contextual word definitions
|
| - Nuenki (by @Alex-Programs) - nuenki.app : Browser extension
| that translates appropriate-difficulty sentences across websites,
| with hover-for-definitions feature
|
| - Manabi Reader (by @wahnfrieden) - reader.manabi.io : Japanese-
| focused integrated reader with SRS and Anki integration
|
| - (by @muth02446) - Spanish: appicenter.net/Apps/VocabES/ -
| English: appicenter.net/Apps/VocabEN/ : Uses spaced repetition
| and audio for basic vocabulary learning
|
| - Vocabuo (by @kebsup) - vocabuo.com : Combines SRS flashcards
| with ebook/YouTube/website reader, using AI for content
| generation
|
| - LingoStories (by @laurentlb) -
| github.com/laurentlb/lingostories/ : Open-source language
| learning tool
|
| - Turkish Learning Tool (by @learning-tr) : Browser extension for
| colloquial translations with audio and pronunciation features
|
| - Language Reactor (by @davidzweig) : Planning to open-source
| soon, looking for contributors
|
| Note: above list is summarized by Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
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(page generated 2025-01-21 23:03 UTC)