[HN Gopher] Ereader Easy Swedish
___________________________________________________________________
Ereader Easy Swedish
Author : cubbic
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-03-03 23:12 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ereader-swedish.fly.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (ereader-swedish.fly.dev)
| cubbic wrote:
| It's a simple llm wrapper that converts any epub to easy swedish
| but one I use now to read all my books. I find it cool and
| something that I actually use and find useful.
| EstanislaoStan wrote:
| I've used Claude to help explain Korean texts, but in Korean.
| kzrdude wrote:
| "easy swedish" is almost an official genre of the language
| because some government information is available in such easy to
| read versions (that's what they are called), but the total text
| amount of it all must be rather small.
| umanwizard wrote:
| There is something similar in German, "einfache Sprache"
| (simple language) and the even easier "leichte Sprache". E.g.:
| https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/siege-fuer-schach-spieler-1...
| EstanislaoStan wrote:
| Yeah, there's the simple English Wikipedia.
| https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia
| johnnypangs wrote:
| There's even radio and Swedish ebooks in "latt" or easy
| Swedish. Helped me when I learned:
|
| Easy Swedish radio news:
| https://www.sverigesradio.se/grupp/22720
|
| Easy Swedish books: https://www.bokus.com/cgi-
| bin/product_search.cgi?series=L%E4...
| INTPenis wrote:
| They also have simplified swedish news broadcasts. It's just
| easier to understand for immigrants who are still learning the
| language.
| vodou wrote:
| It's worth noting that "easy swedish" isn't just for
| immigrants, it as also (mostly?) for people with an
| intellectual disability.
| occz wrote:
| As is often the case with accessibility affordances, they
| tend to improve things for groups outside of their intended
| audience, known as Universal Design. More reading on the
| subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design
| 3836293648 wrote:
| That example is removing a lot of text. Is this the issue in the
| changelog or is it still removing details?
| pigscantfly wrote:
| It converts to latt svenska (simplified Swedish), which is
| usually intended for beginners / students and I believe is the
| point here. The translated text is missing a lot of details,
| though, yes.
| cetu86 wrote:
| I'm currently starting to learn swedish myself. I was looking
| for the translation of "facing the west" but I think that was
| omitted in the translation. (Btw. Why is it facing THE west
| and not facing west anyways?) if the translation omits such a
| lot of detail it's not interesting to me.
| pigscantfly wrote:
| Honestly probably just literary license -- this author
| seems to employ pretty florid prose. I'd say it actually
| sounds more natural to say "towards the west / mot vaster"
| in Swedish since it's more common to use as a noun vs. as
| an adverb than in English.
|
| If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks --
| they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit
| cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if
| you have one nearby with a good foreign language section)
| or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden
| on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't
| really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned
| svtplay.se if you're into that.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| I know, I speak Swedish, but it's missing way more than
| details
| sgt wrote:
| > Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to
| studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable melee
| of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping
| apartments.
|
| From what I can tell, I'd hardly want to read the original. Way
| too verbose and I highly suspect the rest of the book is
| similar.
| chaosprint wrote:
| I found this very useful for learning second language:
| https://immersivetranslate.com/
|
| Daily news is better resource than books IMHO.
|
| I have no vested interest here. The thing is, since it's not open
| source, I'm a bit worried about data privacy, especially because
| the plugin can see everything I browse.
| yyx wrote:
| Is it better than DeepL own extension?
|
| Edit: it is.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I don't think news will give you a well rounded vocabulary. Im
| studying with an Anki deck which got its word order scraped
| from news.
|
| I know three different words for price (price in general,
| specific item, and formal) but I have yet to see, say, oven.
| pm215 wrote:
| Mmm. I think once you get out of the super common words that
| appear in any style of text, the ideal is to learn words from
| something guided by what appears specifically in what you
| want to read. For Japanese I'm currently using jpdb.io, which
| (if there is a deck for the book you're reading) lets you
| work on the words that match what you're reading. It has its
| flaws but overall it's been working out for me.
| seer wrote:
| I think the idea is to use a book that you have already read in
| your language, maybe even multiple time (favourite book).
|
| This way your mind already has all the associations stored in
| your brain for easy access, and you just need to link it to the
| foreign concepts. Supposed to be a great way to learn new
| languages after you know the basic grammar and such.
| vidarh wrote:
| Parallel texts work quite well without having read it before
| too if you keep the original next to you. I lifted by German
| up a whole grade my last year, largely by reading Goethe's
| Faust in parallel with a translation.
|
| Having an easy version is a big boon, though, and I think
| LLMs now provide an amazing opportunity to create custom
| proper parallel texts (showing both) where you could adjust
| the difficulty level of the translation to suit your current
| skill level.
| vidarh wrote:
| It looks great, but I wish these would be more flexible. I'm
| going to have an extension, I'd prefer one that doesn't do only
| full translations.
|
| I'd love a similar one to this that'd give you an "make this
| easier" button that'd start by providing a vocabulary for the
| paragraph, simplifying the language, or interjecting
| explanations in simple language, move to replacing words with
| English translations, and only as a last resort to a full
| translation.
|
| With current LLMs it ought to be relatively easy to offer a UI
| with an "stepwise easier" option and just a handful of prompts
| to direct the "translation" result complexity accordingly...
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Is there something similar in French? Preferably from
| French/English to simplified French?
| vidarh wrote:
| But English _is_ simplified French ;)
|
| With apologies to Dumas ("L'anglais n'est que du francais mal
| prononce" - "English is little more than badly pronounced
| French" - spoken by D'Artagnan in Twenty Years After)
|
| The "quick and dirty" solution would be to cut and paste into
| Claude or ChatGPT, probably in sections to prevent it from
| going too far off piste/forget what it's meant to be doing,
| with a suitable prompt.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| n'est que du -> is only
| mukilan_k wrote:
| This looks so cool, I am thinking of building something like
| this for French.
|
| I am currently planning to take my B1 and it has been super
| hard.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I also learned Swedish, which I think is very interesting,
| because Sweden has 1/4 the population of California, but has a
| relatively large influence on Western culture. At least in my
| mind.
|
| Regarding learning a language, I recommend looking into Dr
| Krashen's theory of language acquisition, specifically
| comprehensible input. His favorite resource is comic books. For
| Swedish, I really like SVT with a VPN.
| memsom wrote:
| A lot of SVT is available with no VPN. It also has apps, so I
| tend to watch it on an Apple TV.
|
| I second comic books, though the Swedish tends to be super
| colloquial and you will get stuff like "dig" rendered as "dej"
| (which is how it is generally pronounced, but not how it is
| formally written.) Kalle Anka is always the classic go to for
| Swedish learners.
|
| NRK on the other hand actively tries to block everyone, which
| makes Norwegian a lot less accessible.
| cess11 wrote:
| For those with VPN, here's SVT:
|
| https://www.svtplay.se/
|
| Swedish public service television also has an educational
| branch, which is here:
|
| https://urplay.se/
|
| I use comic books to teach my kids to read, I agree it ought
| to be a good option for foreign adults too.
|
| On SVT I'd recommend Landet runt (Around the country), it
| shows a lot of feelgood stories from local news and is aimed
| at a broad audience, including kids and the elderly:
|
| https://www.svtplay.se/landet-runt
|
| There's also a news program for kids I think could be a good
| option to learn from:
|
| https://www.svtplay.se/lilla-aktuellt-och-lilla-aktuellt-
| sko...
|
| While I don't watch any of them myself, perhaps competition
| programs might work too:
|
| https://www.svtplay.se/lista/svtId_jQ7LrRQ/tavlingsprogram
| memsom wrote:
| SVT Play (app or web) is a very good resource, and it is
| mostly subtitled in Swedish, which helps a lot. From the UK
| (at any rate) it is pretty rare to find many of the shows
| with georestructions, I do not find many. It is worth
| trying it without a VPN first, as you might be able to save
| money.
|
| As I mentioned above, NRK is not so great. Most of the
| content is geoblocked, and you need a norwegian digital ID
| to watch it outside of Norway (or at least, Skandinavia)
| without a VPN. They also regularly block VPN's, so as an
| example, Tunnelbear used to be fine (and gives a fairly
| generous free tier if you play the "invite friends and do
| some tasks" game), but last time I tried, it was no longer
| working with the NRK TV app.
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| There is also a short news episode for adults, but in easy
| Swedish.
|
| Nyheter pa latt svenska: https://www.svtplay.se/nyheter-pa-
| latt-svenska
| fifilura wrote:
| A method I love, because it is actually a pleasure, is to find
| music you like in the language.
|
| I love listening to the same songs over and over again anyway,
| and once in a while I get curious what they are actually saying
| in a new sentence.
|
| I do this for learning German once in a while, but I am sure it
| would work fine for Swedish as well.
|
| Markus Krunegard is my favourite right now, and I think he
| sings with a clear language.
|
| But there are lots of (pop) music in Swedish with interesting
| lyrics; Veronica Maggio, Little Jinder, Hakan Hellstrom, Miss
| Li, Kent. A very random sample from a much much longer list
| obviously.
|
| And a passive method, so, while it is pure joy, it needs to be
| complemented with actul studying of course.
| alberto_ol wrote:
| The example is the incipit of "The dangerous inheritance" by
| Izola Forrester
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75383/pg75383-images.ht...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izola_Forrester
| Daegalus wrote:
| This is super cool, I might fork this and change the prompt to
| Danish, and maybe use MIstral or DeepSeek as it has better Danish
| capabilities. I moved to Denmark and just passed my A1 exam, so
| looking for more easy stuff to do.
|
| DR.dk has `ligetil` which is simplified/easy danish news. So if I
| can find similar, I use it. I can probably have LLM do easy for
| me. Also Noospeak for daily newsletter in Danish.
|
| LLM has been great for language learning and translation.
| zavec wrote:
| Ooh, those simplified news sites/newsletters sound great, I'll
| have to see if I can find something similar for Norwegian!
| astrolx wrote:
| Sweden has 'latt svenska' (easy Swedish) radio and TV news -
| https://www.svtplay.se/nyheter-pa-latt-svenska -
| https://www.sverigesradio.se/radioswedenpalattsvenska
|
| pretty useful for learning indeed!
| Daegalus wrote:
| Noospeak.com has Norwegian. It is the one I use.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Klar Tale (https://www.klartale.no/) has easy to read
| Norwegian News. It was recommended to us in the government-
| run language classes.
| barrenko wrote:
| Chuck https://lite.cnn.com/ into whatever language you need it
| in.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Generally I would suggest starting with a source in the
| target language and translating it into a language you know.
| deskr wrote:
| Wow, this is nice. I've had a thing like this (well, for German)
| in my mind for years but knew I'd never create it. Thanks!
| unwind wrote:
| I tried to figure out if the translation is correct (the concept
| of a "studio apartment" in English is not easy to express in
| Swedish, and "atelje" is certainly not it).
|
| I even found this [1] comment on Reddit, detailing the exact same
| concern. Perhaps worth looking into?
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/1j4teje/comment/mg...
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'm guessing it is pretty easy to express in Swedish once you
| learn how to speak about housing, though.
|
| Don't know Swedish, but I'm fully lower-to-mid intermediate
| with Norwegian (I hit limits, but my workplace is Norwegian).
| Swedish and Norwegian are really similar. In Norwegian, they
| don't talk about bedrooms as much as total major rooms. So a
| studio apartment, the sort that contains a private bath and
| kitchen area, is a one-room apartment. A one bedroom is a two-
| room apartment.
|
| And it looks like Swedish (unsurprisingly) is similar:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/16aigvx/question_o...
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| A studio apartment in Swedish is "en etta", literally meaning a
| "one room". An apartment with one bedroom would then be "en
| tvaa", two bedrooms "en trea".
| unwind wrote:
| True, it's actually quite simple. :)
|
| The main point stands though, that this is not about art
| studios but just small apartments, and the automatic
| translation messes that up.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's not a studio apartment though. The book takes place in
| some kind of arts center:
|
| "And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting
| without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor
| where a model posed."
| yoavm wrote:
| I'm also learning Swedish, will definitely give this a try. I've
| built https://github.com/bjesus/swe as a quick CLI dictionary
| that also helps with pronunciation and tenses.
| memsom wrote:
| A great Swedish reading resource is 8Sidor (https://8sidor.se/)
| which is the news in "latt svenska" (easy swedish.) You can
| subscribe to a physical copy, but honestly the site is great and
| has built in tools to aid translation (selecting a word or phrase
| it can easily be translated with a few clicks.)
| zersiax wrote:
| Would love this for Finnish, not gonna lie :)
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| I started learning Swedish almost 40 years ago and I wish
| sometimes like this was available back then. As it was, I had to
| study quite hard for about 1-2 years by just listening to a lot
| of Swedish. Reading Swedish comfortably took almost six years to
| learn - I imagine it would have been faster with an app like
| this.
| pivic wrote:
| I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a
| language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of
| idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and
| Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I
| mean.
|
| Here's the first paragraph in English:
|
| > The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was
| situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in the
| West Fifties. Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely
| to studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable melee
| of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping
| apartments.
|
| Here's the first paragraph in the Swedish translation:
|
| > Signor Jacobelli hade en atelje hogst upp i ett gammalt hus med
| atta vaningar. For trettio ar sedan var huset fullt av
| konstnarer, men nu fanns dar bade butiker och lagenheter.
|
| I get that the translation is to a 'simplified' version of
| Swedish; translations of fiction are often restructures of the
| original language, but this is to a point where one not only
| needs to know what the words in Swedish mean, but be able to
| interpret them based on a vast restructure compared with the
| original.
|
| Compare with a Kagi (DeepL) translation of the text:
|
| > Signor Jacobellis atelje i staden vette mot vaster. Den lag
| hogst upp i ett gammalt attavaningshus pa West Fifties. For
| trettio ar sedan hade detta uteslutande varit ateljeer, men nu
| var det uppdelat i en mer lonsam blandning av halvkommersiella
| etablissemang och lagenheter med enklare hushallning.
|
| Kagi maintains the original structure, which makes it far easier
| to compare words and the original structure.
|
| I could be wrong but to me it seems far easier to learn a
| language when a translation doesn't come with a vast restructure
| of the original content.
| pastage wrote:
| I think these issues stems form translating to the language you
| are learning being a bit backwards. It serves a purpose though
| you learn how to say complicated stuff in an easier way.
|
| I am at a basic level in many languages. Often it is enough to
| know that I have the gist right: is it "please step out" or
| "Please do not step out".
| ftrobro wrote:
| Is "atelje" (meaning art studio) really the correct Swedish
| translation here? I suspect "etta" (meaning one-room apartment)
| would be more suitable.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Yeah, 99% sure it's an apartment in this context.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_apartment
| Kiro wrote:
| No, it's not. The book is taking place in some kind of arts
| center for music and art.
|
| "And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was
| bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the
| second floor where a model posed."
| zersiax wrote:
| You're not wrong but I think there is absolutely a case to be
| made for these kinds of restructurings as well. For one, giving
| you the restructured version exposes you to different ways of
| stating the same content, it might make reading longform
| content (without falling back to the original source material
| too often) more fluid, and more situationally, this kind of
| simplification and restructuring actually happens really often
| in subtitling, where character count is more leading than the
| lip movements a dub is based on. e.g. you'll hear one thing,
| but the sub is that same content often radically redone :)
| tapland wrote:
| My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the
| provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies,
| but really feels the need to consume more swedish text.
|
| The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple,
| and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news
| (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and
| niche words), but this seems really nice.
|
| This looks promising for their situation. I'll plop LoTR,
| Antimemetics Division or something in there later and see how
| it turns out!
| dehrmann wrote:
| The problem with learning Swedish is 95% of Swedes speak
| English and are more than happy to speak English.
| amarant wrote:
| And will switch to English as soon as we detect the
| slightest hint of a foreign accent, in a often misguided
| attempt to be helpful.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Except when asked if they speak English, where they then
| very hesitantly say (in perfect English btw) "a little
| bit".
|
| Quite interesting cultural differences btw. In my
| experience, if you ask the same question in Denmark, the
| answer is "of course... Everybody here speaks English"
| stevesimmons wrote:
| When I was learning Dutch, I found the same gap between kids'
| books that were too simple and proper novels that were too
| complex.
|
| Newspapers were the easiest and best way to bridge that. They
| made it easy to pick a story where you had both some interest
| and enough background context.
|
| I started with De Telegraaf, a popular newspaper, with short,
| simple stories and lots of photos. And over the course of 18
| months worked my way up to serious papers like NRC
| Handelsblad and de Volkskrant.
|
| So I'd give newspapers (and magazines) a go.
|
| Back then, I'd sit in a cafe with my dictionary, reading
| their newspapers, and handwriting lists of words to learn.
| Nowadays it would be reading the paper's website on my
| laptop, pasting paragraphs into GPT, and adding the words to
| Anki etc :)
| marssaxman wrote:
| Funny timing - I just finished today's episode of "NOS
| Journaal in Makkelijke Taal". I have not regularly followed
| "the news" in many years, but this channel offers a
| pleasant way to get some daily practice; it's simple enough
| to follow along, with a few new words and phrases to learn
| each time. I'll check out De Telegraaf as well - thanks for
| the recommendation.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Love that it's open source. Here's the magic sauce, i.e. system
| prompt:
|
| > I want to translate this part of a book text to swedish.
| Translate to EASY swedish. Make the sentence structure easy. Make
| the words easy. Simplify it to A1 level while maintaining the
| story meaning. output ONLY the translation. Use the previous text
| and after text to understand the context. previous text:
| "{previous_text}" after text: "{after_text}" text to translate:
| $BEGIN_TEXT${original_chunk}$END_TEXT$ " DO NOT SKIP ANY TEXT
| INSIDE $BEGIN_TEXT$ and $END_TEXT$
| karl42 wrote:
| In a similar vein, I made https://www.wikdict.com/reader/sv-en/ ,
| which adds translation pop-ups to each word in the input text.
| The cool thing compared to manually looking up words is that it
| will translate idioms/phrases (if they are in the dictionary) and
| split compound words (if they are not in the dictionary) into
| their translatable parts.
|
| I also have some code to add the translations as pop-up footnotes
| to epub files (I like to use that on my e-reader). That is not
| mature enough yet for public usage, but if anyone wants to help
| testing it, I can run some e-books through it. Just let me know!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-07 23:01 UTC)