Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner (lairner.com)

Any chance you’ll add Maltese?

> But I wanted something that at least tries to teach you the language instead of teaching you to play a language-themed game.

I'm interested. What's the fundamental difference here, that actually pushes you to learn the language in a useful way?

I watched the demo. It looks like a clone of duolingo. Can you do a better job of explaining how this is different? What features does it have that duo doesn't. How does the app push you to those features vs just falling into the same pattern as duo?

You say you learned Turkish with lairner. What level of fluency did you achieve? Are you able to take in native content with full comprehension?

Edit: I'm not trying to be argumentative, I see a lot of people come on Show HN with these fantastic projects but are poorly marketed. You seem to have some differentiator but I'm not seeing it in action. I wish you the best success with this, and I can assure you, if it's as good as you say I will be your biggest customer and fan.

What is different about how your app teaches language?

70 languages from one guy? Was this vibe-coded?

It gave me a very wrong intro starting lesson number after saying I was second from the most advanced level and answering 26/26 of the intro questions correctly. It was showing me things like what does the 1st most common verb mean, etc. Just FYI.

A bit off-topic, but it's interesting how the first thing I check now is whether this is a vibe coded app (which it seems to be) or something that had serious effort put into it.

I gave a go with a less popular language. This is a clone of Duolingo from the first glance, and does not place you into a correct level after examination.

Funny vibe code glitche in how an excersirce gives away the answer in a transaction of each question.

> I learned Turkish with lairner itself

Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?

> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.

I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?

This seems unlikely to teach anyone to speak a language. The gold standard is comprehensible input. This just looks like a Duolingo clone.

Hi "Tim", are you aware that this is fraud? That this app doesn't help anyone?

How do you prevent gullible users from wasting their time and money on the app rather than learning languages?

From your testimonial that you learned Turkish do you at all mean to imply that a user of your app will have a higher chance of learning Turkish than if they didn't use the app vs say a conversation partner?

Why sell an ineffective product when a more effective one is free?

To quote you "I'm not going to pretend this replaces living in a country or having a conversation partner." This sounds like you believe a simple telephone call is superior to your app. If so why create it? Did you consciously decide to pray on socially anxious people or are you just following other apps blindly?

Something strange I noticed with the Malayalam course (maybe also other languages with a non-Latin script): when a word is shown, two Latin transliterations are shown underneath. The second one looks like an IAST or ISO-15919 transliteration. The first one is often wrong and sometimes even nonsensical. Why not have only the second transliteration?

A couple points based on 10 minutes of trying:

1. I selected "advanced level" for my target language. I expected real sentence. Instead I got a lot of "I am American" and "He is tall" type sentences.

2. In some cases when I was asked to select the word to complete the sentence, multiple options could be correct, but only one was recognized as correct by the program. Concretely, the format was "He is ______" and the possible solutions were "that" "Indian" "American" "comes from" and "French". Three of those options are perfectly grammatical, but only "French" was marked correct.

3. No offense, but this all has the hallmarks of AI slop, which I consider to not be an appropriate way to develop language learning tools, especially at an above-beginner level. Each language has different structures and complications and requires attention to different aspects of the language.

4. Above all, this app does not appear to differ from Duolingo in any substantial way, except that it's worse. If you're going to boast that your app is better than Duolingo, you should substantiate that with a concrete argument. Certainly Duolingo is highly flawed, above all in its total absence of formal grammar instruction which is something that even an AI-generated app should be able to do.

It's always a good initiative to build something on your own.

Then again, it's also good to not lie to your users.

Your courses are AI-generated and not curated by experts.

I tried the French beginner course, using German as my base language. The very first items were:

1. Hallo (hello) > Bonjour (I think salut would be better)

2. Guten Morgen (good morning) > Bonjour

Then it asked me what Bonjour means, and selecting Guten Morgen is wrong, correcting me to Hallo. Then it asked me what Bonjour means again, this time Guten Morgen is correct.

So yeah, good initiative, but please just tell me what it is and don't lie.

Tried this with german as native language and greek as language I want to learn.

First question: Wie steht es um Ihr Greek?

Greek is obviously the english and not the german name of the language. But "Wie steht es um Ihr Griechisch?" wouldn't be grammatically correct either.

As an learning (and conversational) Khmer speaker, I tried the Khmer module.

It's an absolute disaster in both romanization of Khmer characters and pronounciation. Simple words like 'arkun' are pronounced _very_ incorrectly and the romanization is incomprehensible.

I like the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm struggling to see the differentiator between this and duolingo. The Dutch lesson that I did seemed to be pretty identical to dutch lesson in duolingo.

It doesn't seem to have any theme for each lessons either, which is my major bugbear about the new duolingo. (its really obvious in the more well loved languages like spanish)

Seems like false advertisement > Over 700 hand-selected courses created by native speakers and linguists. when it's pure AI with a lot of mistakes (at least couple examples I did).

I don't even need to open the project to know this is vibe coded garbage. This is in no way a personal attack, but the writing style is 100% AI fueled. There's no personality and frankly its too generic to be considered truthful.

The problem is there, but a tool is just not the solution. The solution is to actually put in the elbow grease and learn what you need/want to learn.

Apps need to be dopamine fueled to work, and no one has fixed this problem yet.

I tried the chinese one. The tone for 十一 is wrong. It should be shi2 yi1. But the audio says shi4 yi1. So seems bad quality

This looks nice, but there are so many of these "best way to learn a language" sites/apps these days, I don't even know what to think of that anymore.

When I loaded the page I saw a bunch of placeholder text like "Hero title" for a second then an AI-generated image was the first thing I saw after that. Doesn't inspire confidence that it's "expert crafted."

70+ languages and 700+ courses would imply a staff of people were required to create something like this (if it's of any quality), but it's a "side project"?

Strains credulity.

The Ghibli generated character and logo makes me feel like this is a vibe coded project. I know Duolingo has become more ai-first, but at least they put some effort into the branding and styling of the content.

Just wanted to let you know that some pronunciation audio in Japanese are completely wrong.