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Show HN: Text editor with inline English-German dictionary (github.com)

35 points by ichverstehe ↗ HN
Hi

When you are learning a new language, you need to practice different skills: reading, listening, speaking, writing. I find writing to be the hardest activity, not least because I have to look up words in the dictionary all the time, and that is a frustrating context switch.

Here is an experimental CodeMirror-based editor, that lets you look up translations inline. Type @ followed by the English word, and get a list of possible translations, and select the translation to apply it.

Online demo: https://foreign-dispatch-autocomplete.netlify.app/

18 comments

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97-109-107
This is very clever, I haven't seen such modal conventions for translation/substitution.

I think it's quite original to have the starting point of "I'm almost good enough to write on my own" in stead of starting in the usual spot of full-auto translation pipe dream.

I occasionally use deepl to write messages in languages which I'm rusty, but the-back-and-forth between editing my final output and selecting suggestions in not smooth.

juujian
Love that. I assume for learners an alternative mode would be great where it shows you the word but you still have to type it, just to build muscle memory.
wklm
great stuff, would love to have it as an outlook plugin
agolio
Super cool project!! I can really imagine this being helpful,

I love alternative language learning tools, also keen on for e.g., Language Learning with Netflix which lets you see dual subtitles while watching netflix.

I will drop my own (very naive, possibly incorrect) side project that I made while learning German myself, always happy for feedback! agol.io/trainer

TurkishPoptart
I love the reading and the explanations, it's all very clear, nice work! This trainer is cool, but maybe I'm too ignorant to understand the prompts. For example,

"Das Essen … Frau"

What case is it looking for? I assume it's nominative, but I don't know what the context is. But "die" is not accepted. Is it implied that "the food is eaten by the woman"?

tmtvl
Nominative? You want to say "the food the woman"? I don't really remember the Life of Brian skit, so I'll just skip ahead and say you may want the genetive case: "Das Essen der Frau," "the woman's food."
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agolio
Ah yes, probably needs a bit more explanation there, I wanted to expand that tool with various features like tracking user performance for each case and repeating cases with a low-performance as well, but eventually moved on from the project.

I perceive this kind of stuff to be a bit lacking in e.g., Duolingo which is more focussed on phrases (and I found it to be a bit too repetitive with phrases you already know, while not being repetitive enough with things you are struggling with) which is what motivated the project in the first place.

That particular example I intended the genitive case, so "das Essen der Frau" meaning the woman's food - but definitely need to make that more clear!

Thanks for the feedback!

TurkishPoptart
Ohh...that makes so much more sense now! thanks and well done
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gumby
Makes me wonder if you could reasonably write an LSP server for text and then plug it into your editor for on-the-fly autocomplete, translations etc?
ichverstehe
Definitely something I want to explore later on, if I can make the individual prototypes work well by themselves.
smcin
Neat! Two issues I found:

1) if I type @being I get zero options, even though it's in the dict https://www.wikdict.com/de-en/being . I only get options for expanding @be

2) I can't expand @be/being into a noun ('Beings surrounded our ship'), only into a verb/gerund ('Being John Malkovich')

juujian
That is something which could be addressed by stemming or lemmatizing the input before piping it into whatever you use for translation.
ichverstehe
That's something I will have to look into. Thank you for the suggestions.
vacooom
That's a neat idea. Would love to have that as an Obsidian plugin!