Show HN: Wunderbar – Learn language while working on your Mac

(It would be nice to read more details, just for curiosity. Idiomatic examples are difficult. Do you have more than one example for each word?)

I expect a bigger market in "Something -> English" instead of "English -> Something" that is described in the landing page. Wait a minute, is it bidirectional? Perhaps you can edit the description to highlight the most common case or explain that it can be used in the other direction.

You are using the British flag for English. Do you support American English too? I don't remember all the differences, but an example is "color" vs "colour".

When I was practicing, I would put my devices into Spanish or Finnish.

I’ve been trying to learn Kannada, a South Indian language that my parents speak. Most apps like Duolingo and Babbel don’t support Kannada, so it’s been hard to be consistent.

Also, is there any way to hide the British flag but keep the target language flag?

I'm not upgrading due to breaking compatibility issues with plugins in my audio workstation software

The problems with showing the translation to your native language are:

1. Takes up too much space. On a 16" Macbook Pro I already had to remove various apps from the menubar just for Wunderbar to appear (Apple could handle that better). "complementario <-> complementary" takes up half of the menubar space.

2. Doesn't actually test whether you know the word or not. It's very easy to think you know a word when you see it along with its translation, yet when you hide the translation, you realize it's only at the tip of your tongue. It's why flashcard are so humbling.

I think it'd be better to click the word to summon the popover that reveals the translation + sentences and then answer "I did/didn't know this word".

Using Sway & Waybar, I have this script that puts a new random Swedish word on my bar every minute, and its translation on hover:

  #!/bin/env python
  import json
  import random


  def read_file(file_path):
      with open(file_path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as file:
          return [line.strip() for line in file]


  file_path = "/home/bjesus/Notes/live/swedish.md"
  lines = read_file(file_path)
  line = random.choice(lines)
  text, tooltip = line.split(":")
  data = {"text": text, "tooltip": tooltip}
  print(json.dumps(data))

Yes there was plenty of difficulty navigating the phone at first, but I was surprised at how much muscle memory took over. And it helped me develop my very cheesy joke / deflection to buy time to formulate my response: está cargando (it’s loading).