[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ricotta - Language Learning to Replace Anki
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Show HN: Ricotta - Language Learning to Replace Anki
I've been tinkering with Ricotta for about a year now and I'm happy
to announce it's ready to for others to use officially. Largely the
time has been spent making the project a framework to spin up newer
projects quickly which I can share details around if anyone is
interested. The app was born out of my frustration with Duolingo
drilling me on words I knew. I moved on to creating custom Anki
cards and found myself spending ages creating decks. It's free,
uses spaced repetition under the hood, and focuses on helping you
learn what you want to without a course structure. I'd love to
hear your thoughts or even feature requests:
https://ricotta.affineur.io/
Author : williamsss
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-02-06 22:02 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ricotta.affineur.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ricotta.affineur.io)
| Muromec wrote:
| Is this opensource and compatible with existing anki decks?
| williamsss wrote:
| > Is this opensource My first gen is open source
| https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...
| if you'd like to repurpose it
|
| This one has a fair amount of security and wrappers around the
| latest update I plan to repurpose for profit so unfortunately
| this project is not. Though I'm happy to share how its built if
| you have questions.
|
| > compatible with existing anki decks?
|
| No its not currently. How would you like it to work with Anki?
| Muromec wrote:
| Ah, nah.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Is this open source at all? Can't find a GitHub link.
| williamsss wrote:
| The first gen is https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-
| flashcard-app-gpt...
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Creating Anki decks takes time, how does Ricotta speed up the
| process? Does it have built in decks? If I'm learning Hindi, why
| should I switch? Will it really have great Hindi pronunciation?
| Is my data being used for anything?
|
| Congrats on the launch. The website and the product seem really
| slick and you should be proud. The above questions are my honest
| reaction to seeing your site.
| williamsss wrote:
| It supports Hindi! I haven't had any feedback from a Hindi
| native nor learner. If there's any feedback you can give, even
| if its to say the app is shit I would appreciate your take.
|
| I have a test account and demo video I'm working on. I'll shoot
| it over later this week when I have one or the other so you can
| check it out without commitment or data concerns.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Hey William, I guess I didn't get exactly what it was from
| the homepage. I signed up and the service is awesome. I like
| how you can pick a word and get sentences made for you, that
| is really nice and does improve over the Anki experience. My
| only immediate feedback is that it would be nice to click on
| a single word and hear it instead of the whole sentence. Very
| well done.
|
| However, I am concerned that it is free. Am I the product?
| mlyle wrote:
| Things the webpage should answer:
|
| - If it's free, like you say here, that it's free.
|
| - What languages does it work for?
|
| - What's the process to start?
|
| Things I'm curious about:
|
| - Is this intended to be a business? How do we get surprised by
| this costing something or disappearing in the future?
|
| - Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students
| that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on
| what they're working on?
| AyyEye wrote:
| > Is this intended to be a business? How do we get surprised by
| this costing something or disappearing in the future?
|
| The bottom says: Ricotta developed by Affineur Ventures
|
| Their website says:
|
| > Find the Perfect Buyer or Investor. Exit on Top.
|
| I give it a high likelyhood of enshittification, as soon as
| profitable
| ontoillogical wrote:
| I believe you're incorrect.
|
| When I google that phrase it's from an "Affinity Ventures"
| which is unrelated.
|
| Affineur Ventures seems to just be a cheese themed container
| (hence ricotta). The website just redirects to a login screen
| for something called "holey triangle" https://affineur.io/
|
| I don't think this is a private equity side project...
| williamsss wrote:
| I'm trying to create a brand that will sell apps outside of
| this app. I don't think this app is one people would pay much
| for its a passion project that has helped refine a business
| wrapper as I go through it such as Auth system, legal docs
| system etc.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| One I'd add is, "Can it be used offline/without a browser?"
|
| That's something that's been nice about Anki. As long as I've
| got my laptop I can do reviews, even if I don't have a
| connection or the internet is awful or costs money (flights,
| etc). It runs on everything too which has worked nicely on the
| Linux ultraportable I've dedicated to study purposes.
| williamsss wrote:
| There isn't offline use no - but I'll have read into how I
| could accomplish this. Happy to add support if there's
| significant demand for it.
|
| If anyone has articles for offline web apps I'll have a read
| through.
| williamsss wrote:
| I'll update the marketing site to expand on those thanks for
| the feedback.
|
| > - If it's free, like you say here, that it's free. I'm not
| entirely sure but no I don't think I will charge for this,
| unless I had expensive features users want as I'm out of pocket
| on this myself. Its namely something I'm hoping to learn from
| with marketing and foster a community around. I'm not sure
| where it will go as the moment its a passion project, with a
| wrapper such as auth that I plan to repurpose for profit in
| some way such as a second company or selling the code as a
| starter template.
|
| - What languages does it work for? I can easily add support for
| others if there's requests so far these are what I added
| support for: Mandarin Spanish Hindi Arabic French Portuguese
| German Japanese Russian Italian Malay Persian Polish Greek
| Czech
|
| - What's the process to start? 1. Add a word you wish to learn
| 2. It will generate 4 cards for that word with examples for you
| 3. Review the card based on your memory recall of "good" "okay"
| "bad" and you'll see the card based on spaced repetition more
| often until you have marked it as good enough times it will
| come up less frequently.
|
| - Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students
| that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on
| what they're working on? I'm open to adding
| internationalization! But want to get the english app at a
| point I can justify the time commitment.
| kazinator wrote:
| Anki can be used to memorize anything. It is not specifically for
| learning languages.
| williamsss wrote:
| Agreed. Anki is awesome! I just was spending too much time
| creating Anki cards and created this for my self. Some friends
| saw how I was using the first gen (https://github.com/Amber-
| Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...) and wanted it as well.
| So I made it into an app and researched a far around learning
| that I hope to pin down an app others can use too.
|
| here's a great article on the power of spaced repetition any
| anki lover will enjoy - https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
| kazinator wrote:
| Importing data into Anki is mostly easy. It takes a delimiter
| separate format, semicolon by default. I prepared most of my
| larger decks just with some text processing followed by a CSV
| import. Cards with images just have HTML image tag references
| to file names. You generate the cards a CSV with the right
| HTML referencing the file names. Then make sure the files are
| located in the right directory.
| michaelgolden44 wrote:
| I am a working to learn a second language right now, one of the
| elements I have encountered is that I don't like is the anki apps
| UI, and the variety of stylings of anki cards from deck to deck,
| and how audio plays (or doesn't) depending on the app (web, mac,
| ios). Lot's of little UX frustrations that push me away from
| using it myself constantly.
|
| I see from your LinkedIn for the site that the application:
| "automatically generates personalized Anki decks. With integrated
| spaced repetition, automated word examples, and native audio, it
| lets you build efficient, focused lessons--no rigid courses
| required."
|
| Based on the wording and having used the application briefly
| before the application crashed, I'm assuming this is some kind of
| LLM backend that generates the text data for the cards as well as
| the audio from a TTS model for each card?
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong on that, because I've personally
| worked to build something similar for personal use and would love
| to read more about your framework and what's going on under the
| hood.
| williamsss wrote:
| Sure I started from this app which is open source
| https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...
|
| You're welcome to repurpose the code. It uses web text-speech
| api which I had a fair amount of beta feedback that the voices
| sounded robotic. So moved to a TTS model in the backend. This
| came with a load of heavy processing along with a translation
| model which crashed my app when I initially released it on
| r/languagelearning that had I had fun challenges to scale.
|
| If its an app just for you, you can get away with more and
| greatly simplify the app.
| morninglight wrote:
| Neither Ricotta nor Anki have been able to help me learn this
| language.
|
| https://youtu.be/VJVS9RsIrN8
| dankwizard wrote:
| What algorithm are you using for SRS?
|
| Anki recently updated to include (the much better) FSRS4.5
| algorithm alongside their usual (and still default) SM-2.
| david_allison wrote:
| In-case you haven't updated: FSRS 5.0 was released in Anki
| 24.11
| dankwizard wrote:
| Thank you, I hadn't noticed!
| williamsss wrote:
| It uses an older version of FSRS. Now that I know I'll update
| later this week to v5. Thanks
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| I spent 10 minutes or so playing around with this and it is
| impressive. I've also built a couple of small side projects
| around language learning out of frustration with Duolingo.
|
| I'm around a C1 level in French and am just starting to learn
| Polish. The audio pronunciations are a great feature here and (at
| least in French, where I can judge it) the accents are quite
| good. I can see this being quite useful for my Polish work for
| learning some of the basics.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Using it a bit more, it doesn't seem that the C1 or C2 level
| generated sentences are anywhere close to being C1 or C2 level.
| I'd be curious to understand the sentence generation process
| and how it is or is not attempting to generate sentences at
| various CEFR levels.
| williamsss wrote:
| Agreed I have heard that feedback a few times now. I tried to
| make sure the A and B levels were pinned down as it was quite
| verbose in my testing. I'll have a look into C1 and C2
| levels. If you have examples I can back test against I'll use
| them.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| williamsss wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I started with web text-to-speech APIs
| and beta testers hated the robotic sounds so spent a fair
| amount of time getting text-to-speech right.
|
| Looking forward to seeing more advanced ML models in the
| browser as that's how this project started really.
| jbaudanza wrote:
| I really like this concept, and am working on a similar product
| for my own self-study.
|
| I would like to see more language support. For me, I'd like to
| study Korean
|
| The UX around card navigation needs some work. It took me a long
| time to figure out that after I chose a smiley face, that I was
| moving to a new card. This was especially true if the next card
| is similar to a previous card.
| williamsss wrote:
| I can add Korean tonight. I'll ping you once its shipped.
|
| What would you prefer over smiley faces? Something like "bad"
| "okay" "good"?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I use Anki a lot and thanks for these, this is great
|
| oh yeah for improvement I think you can add shortcut keyboard so
| I don't need to hover around my mouse or bigger accessible button
| outside card area
| williamsss wrote:
| Sure that's a great idea
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I'd have to see some serious stats to believe whatever SRS
| algorithm you use is better than FSRS (which is supported in
| Anki).
|
| Stats for FSRS here (and elsewhere) [0].
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18csuer/fsrs_is_now_t...
| marcusbuffett wrote:
| Yeah as someone working on educational software, anything hand-
| rolling their own SRS is a pretty big red flag. Beating FSRS is
| going to be next to impossible, especially FSRS with parameters
| optimized from your users' review history.
| jamager wrote:
| FSRS is so cargo-culted. It's just an algorithm, claiming
| that any algorithm can't be improved is ridiculous.
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| Actually, we have found some algorithms which outperform
| FSRS[1]. Unfortunately, it's hard to deploy them in user's
| local device.
|
| [1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-
| benchmark?tab=...
| williamsss wrote:
| The app is using the same Anki FSRS algo its open source
| https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki
|
| Agreed would be swimming against the tide rolling a custom
| one. Anki's is awesome! This app functions much the same just
| makes card generation MUCH faster than Anki.
| jamager wrote:
| not OP. I have a competing product with an ad-hoc algorithm
| that I 100% believe is better than FSRS (tested it for months
| or real practice)
|
| But what you ask is not feasible, neither I nor OP have 700
| millions of reviews to stack up against FSRS.
|
| I have my own experience and a bunch of simulations, and if
| FSRS were better I would have switched to it.
|
| The reason in my case btw is that FSRS is generic, mine is
| tailor made for languages - big difference.
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| You don't need to beat FSRS with 700 millions of reviews. You
| can collect thousands of reviews for months and compare the
| ad-hoc algorithm with FSRS on those reviews.
| williamsss wrote:
| It uses the same FSRS as Anki. You can see some of the logic in
| my open source version of the app here
| https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt...
|
| Anki uses this FSRS which is an open sourced algorithm
| https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki
| lthornberry wrote:
| How are you generating the decks? There are some incorrect
| translations, at least for for the version of Spanish I learned.
| Maybe there's a dialect that says "ser usado" instead of
| "acostumbrarse" for "be used to"?
| williamsss wrote:
| I've noticed this myself with Spanish, Italian and French. Such
| as the word for "bill" in the word card vs the example cards.
|
| Its something I plan to refine in my next release.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| lthornberry wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed later that the example sentences used the
| correct translation. Presumably that's because it's easier
| for translation software to differentiate among the various
| meanings of "used" when it's in the context of a sentence.
| williamsss wrote:
| I think you're right. I'll add a final step to validate all
| the text based output to circumvent this.
| naet wrote:
| I tried a little Japanese (the second language I know best). Not
| sure where the content comes from but the translations were
| wrong, the vocabulary was strange, and otherwise the cards did
| not work out for me. Seems like they were auto generated via AI
| or google translate or something, in any case they were not
| accurate or natural sounding. Maybe other languages are better
| but I wouldn't know enough to tell.
|
| Anki is one of my favorite pieces of software ever so I was
| definitely willing to try yours. Seems like the feature that
| defines your app is auto-generation of a card / set of cards.
| Didn't see any way to create your own card, all you can do is put
| in an English word and get the automatically generated card added
| to your deck. So if that's not working well the entire thing
| crumbles.
|
| Interesting idea that might have a future if it finds significant
| improvement. I think if it was ironed out I would still prefer it
| to spit out an anki compatible deck that I can use in Anki itself
| instead of in the ricotta web app.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| If you have iOS/macOS, I've made a native app for mining
| Japanese web/ebook content into Anki (or Manabi Flashcards
| which is getting FSRS soon too): https://reader.manabi.io
|
| I'm currently working on adding first-class Mokuro integration
| for manga mode, bilingual user-provided or Whisper-generated
| captions for video, an HDMI-input mode with realtime lookups,
| and local/BYOK AI features. And once I add Yomichan dictionary
| support, I will be able to go multilingual too. I also have a
| beta available via the Discord that resolves some bugs that I'm
| trying to release very shortly.
|
| I've added Anki integration and am working on WaniKani + JPDB
| sync. Hopefully more service integrations soon too. I like to
| have nice defaults but let users keep their flashcards wherever
| they like. Ricotta too if there were an API.
| williamsss wrote:
| I would download this if you had a latin language spin off
| jamager wrote:
| Can i get your feedback on https://thehardway.app?
|
| I tried the best I can to test specially Japanese and Chinese
| without speaking those languages myself.
|
| the app uses real human content (audio and text) for the most
| part, so hopefully it comes natural enough. there is still some
| AI though
| sdrothrock wrote:
| Just dropped in my email to try out the Japanese. I'll let
| you know.
|
| I'm not really sure what to do with this -- I thought you
| wanted someone to take a look at some Japanese content, but I
| can't find any in the app/tutorial.
| jamager wrote:
| thanks! right, there is no content. you build your library
| along the way, the feedback request is about autogenerated
| flashcards (basically you create and import content and
| then it autogenerates flashcards for you)
| williamsss wrote:
| At first glance this is well designed and something I would
| use. I'll have a play after work and let you know
| jamager wrote:
| thanks, i'd appreciate if you let me know what you think ,
| this is still very beta
| williamsss wrote:
| Okay I had a closer look now. Tbh I don't download
| anything that isn't a major brand product or open-source.
| I'm guessing the amount of work you put into this you're
| planning to monetize the app right? If so my first point
| of feedback would be to support either a web app or
| mobile app.
|
| I really enjoy the concept behind the app focusing on
| subjects rather than structured lessons. I enjoy going on
| learning rabbit holes so this would fit me better than
| structured lessons.
|
| Lastly a video or demo of the app would help as the UI is
| quite complex. It's not clear how I would go from
| importing a web page to using the cards for example.
|
| Feel free to ping me if you have updates - happy to help
| support another indie dev!
| ibdf wrote:
| wow, this looks nice. I will download it this week to give it
| a go. At a first glance this looks like notion for learning
| languages.
|
| I have been using Babbel, and while it's nice to have mini
| lesson to take each day... they offer no option to write out
| notes, or to look at the grammar and get some context, no
| extra examples and flashcard system is just awful.
| jamager wrote:
| thank you very much, will be happy to hear what you think!
| williamsss wrote:
| All fair points of feedback. I use it for latin languages so
| getting a take on the quality of other languages is something
| I'll work on. Could you give me an example that it gave you
| that missed the mark?
|
| I could have it output the deck into Anki I like that idea. I
| wrote a script that did this from CSV but it didn't have audio
| so I moved to this making the first gen of this app - its open
| sourced here if you would like to repurpose it
| https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-
| gpt.... I could try and find my code I make to generate the
| Anki deck if anyones interested as well.
|
| Custom cards is something I agree is a nice to have. If you
| have preferences please share I'll try to add them to future
| feature updates.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Minor nitpicks:
|
| Dark grey text on black background (navigational menu items,
| testimonials) is not readable.
|
| Section 5 of your Terms and Conditions are, in part, utter
| nonsense. It says there that as a user of the service, I have to
| display cookie banners (how? where?) and other duties that make
| no sense whatsoever. Are you sure that this is what you wanted to
| say?
| williamsss wrote:
| Great feedback thanks. Will have a look into these.
| rciorba wrote:
| Just tried it for German. The cards gave me the word without
| their article. Because grammatical gender is so important and
| impacts so many aspects (adjectives, case markers, etc), you
| really should learn the word with the article, otherwise you'll
| be in a world of pain later.
| williamsss wrote:
| Yep I noticed that myself. I need to refine the translations
| better. If you have examples you would prefer to see for German
| I can back test against them.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| People stop naming things after real existing words.
| barnabyjones wrote:
| It doesn't handle homonyms well, since the AI isn't given
| contextual reference. The sentences are also too simple on
| advanced level, so you don't get much more out of it than just
| reviewing the words. The AI coming up with words for you doesn't
| add a ton of value, most languages have standardized tests with
| good word lists that learners should already be using. Adding the
| issues others mentioned, I think this is feasible but needs
| agents taking additional steps to mimic what a real tutor would
| do and formulate a useful short lesson.
|
| Personally I find Duolingo great for Japanese, I have the
| opposite problem: I run out of hearts if I try to do review and
| the app rarely gives me much old content, so I don't practice it.
| If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for different
| levels I might use it to supplement. But letting users choose
| words/a topic is not necessarily important, most people don't
| know what they should study so it might be better to have
| "recommended" premade decks for different levels.
| williamsss wrote:
| This is incredibly valuable feedback.
|
| >The AI coming up with words for you doesn't add a ton of
| value, most languages have standardized tests with good word
| lists that learners should already be using. Adding the issues
| others mentioned, I think this is feasible but needs agents
| taking additional steps to mimic what a real tutor would do and
| formulate a useful short lesson.
|
| I plan to refine the content certainly. If you have examples I
| could use for a baseline to achieve what you want that would
| help me back test against I'll try to add that into the next
| release batch.
|
| > If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for
| different levels I might use it to supplement. I see the app to
| be used in tandem with a structured lesson rather than
| structured lessons in the app. Similar to an Anki study deck.
|
| I had looked into lessons for the app on my 3rd iteration of
| this and went through a massive refactor for it all to be
| lesson based. In the end, it felt like AI slop so I kept it
| simple with vocab to start. In any case, I will refine the
| marketing copy to reflect that.
| hellotomas wrote:
| Take a look into "What Our Learners Say" section as I can't see
| reviews on chrome (some kind of color issue). Otherwise app looks
| cool, gonna try this weekend!
| williamsss wrote:
| Thanks will do. Please let me know your thoughts after you give
| it a spin.
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