I have been working on http://phrasing.app - a language learning & acquisition tool for polyglots. I’ve been using it to study ~12 languages (5 on maintaince, 2 seriously studying, 5 casually “studying”) and it’s starting to feel really good. If anyone is learning/maintaining several languages, please reach out! I’m looking for beta testers in as many languages as possible (it supports 120+).
In what I believe is still the spirit of the question though, I discovered Maltese these week and have added it to my casual study. It’s a Semitic language (closely related to Arabic), written in the latin script, with about 40-50% of its vocabulary being Italian/Sicilian based. It’s become my new obsession
I have just created an account and tried to use the app; either I am dumb (at this hour), or the app has a very not intuitive UI :-)
I (think I) managed to create an expression, but:
1. it takes forever, I don't know what it's doing and it's still not done
2. I have no idea how to use it, onward
3. does not seem that I will be actually able to use it, as the app requires to be subscribed to use it...
Looking forward for a how to use manual / page + a real trial period. If the app requires a subscription with this UX experience, I will be gone :-)
I am the first to admit that the UI does not make sense to people who have not seen it in use. I have done some user onboarding sessions where you just “let them ask questions and click” and it goes terribly if it’s any consolation, I have never gotten that feedback after showing people how to use it (quite the opposite actually!)
Wrt to the expression, all expressions created today succeeded, so if you’re still seeing a progress bar let me know as that’s a bug. It’s possible something failed with the live updates, or it does take several minutes to create an expression (depending on servers, it can take up to 10 minutes at times, although the typical timing is 2-4 minutes depending on the expression)
If you click on any of the review methodologies, it will start reviewing any of your successful expression. From there, the experience should be a lot more explorer-friendly :)
What it’s doing is: analyzing the sentence, splitting it into phrases, aligning it across all languages, tagging all of the gender/case/tense/etc, researching pronunciation, generating audio, aligning the audio, prioritizing the words (across several axes), and generation explanations/dictionary for each individual word
As someone who is both an avid language learner and a software developer - what’s the value added in this platform, for someone who is already pretty comfortable as a programmer and autodidact?
It would take a lot to convince me to pay that much for a product like this. True, it can be inconvenient trolling around for content in your target language, but as a software dev I am pretty experienced with finding obscure things on the internet by finessing search queries. And there are plenty of other apps out there that do spaced repetition for you, and open source tools and data sets that can be used to help you scrape/process vocab (again, if you don’t mind spending some time debugging, which I personally do not). Besides that, I really don’t find it that inconvenient to manually write down words/phrases from books or movies and copy them into my SR deck. On the contrary, I think this overhead actually helps the phrases stick better!
So how would you sell your site to someone in my situation? What would I get out of it?
I would have to know more about your circumstances before I could make genuine recommendations. But as an autodidactal programmer, I can serve as somewhat of an authority on this manner ;) The value I get out of the platform is:
1. I can study all my languages on the same platform. For my, having studied 30+ languages (note: not claiming to speak them), I just want to “do my languages”. I can study dialectal Arabic, minority languages, archaic languages, and the major languages, all in a nice consistent and (if I can say so myself) beautiful UI.
2. Everything is heavily annotated with all the information you could ever need. This means that I add flashcards, and when I’m learning them, I have the gender, cases, tenses, agglutination, phonetics, translations, audio, conjugation/declention tables, character breakdowns, mutations, idioms, multilword expressions, roots, etymology, etc etc (the list really does go on) at my fingertips. This means I just go through my flashcards, and when I have a question, I get an answer. If I have more questions, I have a context aware chat integrated. For me, this is the autodidactal dream come true.
3. Personally, I really love SRS. I also really hate SRS. If I have to study the words “dog”, “walk”, & “morning” - and I have a sentence “I walk my dog in the morning”, I just want to study that one one sentence and be done with it. Also, I really want to just be able to play audio sentences and listen to them while cooking/cleaning/walking my dog. Or do a free recall sessions, write down everything I remember from yesterday, and skip those reviews today (it’s more effective than SRS anyways).
Lastly, WRT to creating your own flashcards: You can still create flashcards manually on Phrasing - I agree the act of creating flashcards is beneficial, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone - but I’m not sure I buy it’s the highest leverage way for one to spend their time. At least for me, it definitely is not. I would rather skip that (admittedly beneficial) step, and move onto the next step. YMMV
It’s really hard to narrow the list down to three, I have a hundred things I want to say, but I’ll leave it here. Due to popular demand, I recorded a few live demos today so you can see it in action:
Learning Latvian through Anki flashcards, but it's not well supported by the main platforms, and there's not a huge amount of content out there for learning.
This alongside a couple of the usual suspects.
As a side note, on a Pixel 4a 5G (old phone , but functionally not ready for e-waste) the homepage bleeds all over. Some components into each other, others off screen. Might want to check that.
Oh no, the website is brand new, it should be working everywhere. I'll have to dig up an older android, I should have one somewhere.
Languages below, if you know their alpha 3 code. Currently having some issues with Thai and Zulu though, so they're temporarily disabled until I have time to fix them.
I have not ~tested~ verified it for Latvian, I would be curious to hear your thoughts. It has been working pretty well for Maltese, Albanian and Macedonian though, which should be lower resource than Latvian!
As mentioned elsewhere, the first time user experience is abysmal. If you reach out though we can hop on a call and get you set up - or in a few weeks I'll have a video done and up. In the meantime, you should be able to create an expression (in the nav bar for desktop and mobile) fairly intuitively.
The UI was a little unresponsive on mobile, and when I opened the "Media" page on desktop I got multiple block rendering errors. Opening the console reveals a syntax error (missing ] after element list) and some type errors.
Also, it looks like you have to get the subscription to use it in any way? It's hard to gauge whether it is for me or not if I have no way to trial it. I found the UI a bit confusing too, I was not sure what I was supposed to do after logging in. As another commentator mentioned, it's asking me to set a reference language but I see no way of configuring it.
Block rendering errors on the media page is new to me. I will look into it.
The reference language error should not be shown (I mean it’s not incorrect, but there is a “no expressions error” that should take precedence).
A video is coming :) I didn’t expect so much interest from a comment in this thread. If you get in touch, I can walk you through it personally, otherwise check back in a couple weeks and there will be a video overview.
Since you're in Amsterdam, I'm curious how well you think it performs for learning Dutch? I'm a native English speaker with a B2~ in Dutch and just looking to progress more. I've not used spaced repetition up to this point in my learning journey (almost 3 years).
It does really well, 95% of the time. The application was built to jump in at any levels - find a movie you want to watch, align the subtitles, see the most important words, create expressions with words you don't know, and the SRS should focus on the words most important to you.
For my Dutch (which was probably once a high B2, now probably a low B1) I only use the audio review when walking my dog or cooking. It plays the audio of the cards in a playlist, so I practice hearing and repeating them.
It's not so self serve at the moment, but if you get in touch I can get you up and running.
I was quite eager to check this out. As some polite feedback, a few things turned me off quite strongly:
1. I want to get confirmation that the language I want is covered (Hungarian). "120+" doesn't confirm it for me, as Hungarian seems fairly rare for language apps. Can we not just have a "search your language" field?
2. I need to see what the app actually looks like, how it proposes it'll teach me.
I'm one of the eager-to-pay people, because Duolingo is frankly dogshit (ok. Mostly polite) at teaching languages (doubly so ones that it doesn't care about like Hungarian). But I'm so suspicious of language apps, due to being burnt a dozen times.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree with you completely.
1. I just started the marketing website a few weeks ago, and if you can believe it, I didn't readily have that information. One of my tasks last week was to compile a list of languages that could work, write some tests for all of the languages, and get a list of supported languages. I have that list now, I just need to put it on the marketing page.
2. As mentioned in other comments, I'm working on a video. I'm preferring to fix glaring issues before making the video, although at this point I'm verrrrrrry close. I have started scripting it, but it takes a lot of time to make a good video (1-2 full days if I don't want to edit it).
Your feedback is completely valid, and they're both reasons why I'm not really marketing the product yet. This thread seemed like a good middle ground though as having some people using all the languages would be really helpful. Also, I've genuinely been loving using it and want to share.
It's just me working on it, so these things are coming, but everything takes a while! Hopefully these didn't sour you on the project permanently :)
Nope, not soured. And don't worry, I totally get that things take a bunch of effort and time (doubly so as a solo project). I'll give it a re-look in a little while :)
Unfortunately I do not have a windows device to test with. I have a suspicion as to what’s causing it (background blurs) and I plan to get rid of it this week
i signed up and tried to use it. The UI is very confusing. i couldn't find the place to setup what language i want to learn and what language i know (for translation). It is best if you can have a video or images documenting how to use it.
Agreed. I’m getting close to a video to put on the landing page, probably some time next week.
The first time user experience is really bad, but the app itself makes a lot of sense once you see it in action. Feel free to get in touch with me (there are several methods listed when you log in) and I can give you a personal introduction!
If not then check back in a few weeks for a cool video :)
Yes, please. I've been looking for something like this. Lately I've been just casually going into another language with ChatGPT and asking it to correct me. I do I like some of the old languages, things like Aramaic, which just have a different feel.
I signed up, but now it's asking me for a "reference language" (which is a little ironic because it tells me this in English lol). I guess I'll play with this later.
Start by creating some expressions ("create" in the nav bar) and you should be able to play around with it. If you want to learn more, please get in touch. As mentioned elsewhere, I'll be adding a video tutorial soon (probably not this week, but sometime next week if all goes well).
Would love to get feedback on the old languages! It's been really good for the minority languages I'm learning
In what I believe is still the spirit of the question though, I discovered Maltese these week and have added it to my casual study. It’s a Semitic language (closely related to Arabic), written in the latin script, with about 40-50% of its vocabulary being Italian/Sicilian based. It’s become my new obsession