Show HN: I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app (phrasing.app)
Over the last few years, I've been building an app to learn languages. It supports ~85 languages and ~40 dialects, and is optimized for learning and maintaining multiple languages.
Learning a language is a ton of work, but really quite simple. Find text you're interested in, dissect and understand it, and review it often. Grind that every day for a few years, and you'll be fluent.
So I built Phrasing for 4 main reasons:
1. To have an app I would actually be excited to use every single day for years.
2. To do all the research, explanation, prioritization, course planning and management for me, so I could just focus on learning
3. To support learning multiple languages as a first class citizen
4. To have a nice, unified interface to learn languages from Spanish to Arabic to Cantonese
I've been using it daily now for almost a year to learn a variety of languages and I've been loving it. I have an awesome group of users in the Telegram channel who have been using it as well to great success.
If you're a polyglot, an avid language learner, or someone who tried to use Anki in the past but found it wasn't for them — I think you might really like Phrasing :)
EDIT: Phrasing is a paid application, but there are 30 expressions you can try for free in the islands tab (you'll see 10 of them in the onboarding flow as well)
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PS: Phrasing uses FSRS under the hood, so a huge thank you to the FSRS team and Jarrett Ye for all the amazing work. Phrasing would not be the product it is without you!
PSS: I'm documenting some of the latest updates on the blog this week, they're 50% product and 50% technical, might be of special interest to the HN crowd: https://phrasing.app/blog/launch-week-1
6 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] thread- it's really complex. It reads like a tech product instead of an accessible app.
- i wish i could demo it with other languages on the homepage. Greek is, well, greek. I understand some Spanish and French so if i could use those as examples I could immediately "get" the effectiveness of the app by basing it on the knowledge I already have. I would recommend showcasing the most popular language.
- should show the supported languages as icons with text above the fold.
I'm always excited to learn about new language apps as duolingo is a bit basic!
How has the translation quality changed / improved since this Show HN a couple years back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39177467
For languages not using the Roman alphabet, is it required that the user know the characters already? After registering but before starting a trial, I wasn’t clear on this.
Some comparison of who should choose this over Duolingo and why (ie features) could be useful.
Omg I just realized you commented on my last post and I spelled your name wrong in my post. I’m so embarrassed, and that comment makes so much sense now XD I didn’t realize that was you