Show HN: A New Way to Learn Languages (langturbo.com)
https://www.langturbo.com (No signup required)
There are a lot of tools to learn languages, but most of them focus on beginners (understandably so, that’s where the money is) but not many exist that target intermediate or advanced learners. The ones that exist make you find content on your own and then import that into their apps, which can be tricky when you don’t know where to look.
LangTurbo has a unique curated database of podcasts by language (some even have dialect labels) that you can browse by topic, or search by keyword, so you can discover content and learn in the same place.
Having a good language learning method is important, but having the motivation to keep learning is much more important. Some tools like Duolingo try to keep you motivated with “gamification”. I don’t like that, I think it gives you a false sense of accomplishment without real improvement. The way LangTurbo tries to keep you coming back is via the content itself. My goal is that you discover some podcast that interests you enough to keep coming back to listen to new episodes, the same way you listen to podcasts in your native language. I wrote more about the method here [1]
The app also lets you learn without looking at the screen, you can listen to a podcast in the background and for each sentence you will first hear the translation in English and the native speaker after. I call it “poor man's Pimsleur mode”.
Some things I learned while building the app:
* Currently the best SRS algorithm is FSRS, the app uses this algorithm implemented in SQL (thanks to [2])
* Working with Expo (React Native) was a great experience, the app has web, iOS and Android (coming soon) clients sharing most of the codebase.
* A lot of non-English podcasts have a feed with English as the language. I had to build a “probe” to get the correct language of a podcast, based on the text and audio of the feed.
* Podcasts use “Dynamic Ad Insertion”, that means the content of the audio can change according to the request IP or the time of the request.
* Still amazed by all the things Postgres can do
Let me know what you think, happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://www.langturbo.com/blog/langturbo/getting-started
55 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadclick https://app.langturbo.com/?lang=french
click https://app.langturbo.com/discover/episodes?id=7&title=LangT...
click https://app.langturbo.com/player?id=aHR0cHM6Ly9zdG9yYWdlLmdv...
observe it speak in Japanese (I don't know enough Japanese to know if it was reading the on-screen text in Japanese or what it was saying)
Some cool ideas for the spoken translation - allow the translation to come before the original audio - even better, maybe make it configurable. Imagine being able to hear the original, then translation, then the original again! Another thing that would be great is to hear the translation with different levels of volume - maybe a bit quieter, that way perhaps the brain neurons wouldn't be bombarded so intensively. Also, some quiet pauses between the original and translation would help as well.
E.g. I'd love to use it for Norwegian -> German
If you add a PWA install thing and offline mode that would be interesting to me. Most of my podcast time is on walks. App is useful too for the same reason.
The memorize function<->bookmark relation was not obvious to me, making that clearer would be great. I really like the idea of having a sentence, though, that you can test your understanding of instead of just a word.
The Pimsleur mode is really great idea and I love that it's there but the TTS is atrocious. I'm pretty tolerant, but even I would have a hard time listening to that on an hour-long walk, for example.
One suggestion to make it more usable:
If I hover over a word in the foreign language, I should instantly see the equivalent word(s) in English highlighted. This way I can look up the words I do not know know very quickly, w/o interrupting the listening experience.
Yes, I know I can click on a word to see what it means, but it's too slow for the purpose of identifying its English equivalent.
In a previous life I was a linguist in the military and would definitely have used this if it were available at the time.
- It took me a second to find auto-pause. Maybe some of those things in the settings menu could be more accessible, similar to how Spotify puts shuffle/repeat icons near the play button.
- I would really like the arrow keys to move back and forth between auto-pause points.
- Regarding auto-pause, it seems to clip off a little early, maybe consider extending the duration or adding a little bit of overlap?
- When clicking to define a word, "Define in Context" is a nice feature to have but is maybe a little slow (and possibly expensive on your end?) to have as a default. I think just opening a static dictionary lookup by default would be nice. With Japanese, I am able to work around this with the Yomitan browser extension though.
- I probably wouldn't use the spoken translation feature, but when I tried it, the voice sounded very robotic considering the high standards for AI-generated voices these days. Though I imagine a better voice might be a cost barrier.
Please don't take this as harsh criticism, just some initial impressions. Overall I really like the idea and will likely continue to use it for listening practice.
Was going to suggest a click to reveal translation option, but it's already in the settings.
Wondering if/how you plan to monetize this. Might there be intrusive ads in the futures or current features cut into a subscription?
Great idea though, good luck.
- Buttons to click thru examples for words, waiting is slow
- Partial load of podcast screen (for speed)
- Playback controls for podcasts would be nice (skip, ff, 1.5x)
- Define word in hover would probably be faster/more seamless + pronunciation
- Search bar for known words + alphabetical.. (OR if heard N times -> known)
Also, get the avoidance of gamification, but would like some sort of progress tracking (mins listened, lexicon, % of top 1k frequency). Will play some more when signups work.
Note that you track your progress seeing the minutes played and the words marked as known when you click on the button on the top right in the "Profile" tab.
Is the signup not working for you?
UPDATE: I was able to get around the issue by attempting to login with my unregistered email.
Currently you cannot navigate await from the screen that says "Waiting for your link click", so you will need to open the email in a different app than your browser, or in a different tab.
Sorry about the trouble, I will make this more clear in the UI. If you want you can email me at contact at langturbo dot com and I can look into it.
A few points of early feedback after 15min of listening with only “Show Translation” on:
1. Showing only a fragment of each sentence at a time feels hard to follow as in scanning to the start of the next fragment (which can jump around vertically) and lacking the context of previous words
Would you consider a view that shows more of the surrounding words but, like focus mode in iA Writer, grays out the non-current fragment?
2. There are sometimes gaps in transcription/translation
3. I couldn’t find my favourite Spanish podcast, Radio Ambulante, which I feel would probably be quite a popular one for Spanish learners — Any particular reason?
I see that the search function is a little bit buggy, if you copy paste "Radio Ambulante" in the search bar you should see it.
(For reference, it didn't show up with search term "radio ambulante" but did with "Radio Ambulante")
A few bits of feedback:
1. It's not at all clear that one should "Bookmark" a snippet to add it to the study queue. Perhaps reword the toast to say "Sentence marked for study" or similar.
2. I can't seem to unmark snippets from the podcast player.
3. The snippets are almost never entire sentences for me, and I would appreciate having quite a bit more context in the snippet review--at minimum, the preceding and following snippets. I should note that the snippet size is fine for reading along with the podcast.
4. I'm very intrigued with the Pimsleur mode. I could see myself being a heavy user of that feature with some tweaking. At my level, repeating everything in English is too much. It would be neat if it only repeated words I haven't marked as known, and if it only repeated that word in translation instead of the entire snippet. I also think I would want to hear the Spanish before the translation to English.
Is there a place I can suggest new podcasts? I listen to some French podcasts the old fashioned way, for exactly this purpose.