By "your favorite books" does this mean that I can take a picture of a book, or upload a PDF or something? For IP reasons I'm certain your app can't come with any of my favorite books.
You can upload an ePub file within the app.
Readit Newsjonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
It's not primarily rules based as that would be impossible to scale. Where rules are helpful is to provide principles for when a longer or shorter phrase is chosen.
Optimising the tradeoff between more frequent repetition of vocabulary versus better quality grammar examples is where a lot of the work is.
I'll actually expand on this, because I think it gets at an interesting point, and at a fundamental 'bet' I'm making.
The approach I use should work if there are sufficient 'scaleable' ways to improve accuracy and choose the right phrases. Language analysis, NLP, LLMs etc all help here, and there are many methods I can still use and will add over time. I'm very much at a proof of concept stage right now!
This approach won't work if accuracy improvements quickly reach diminishing returns and an explosion of rules and/or human proofing to handle edge cases are required.
I'm hoping for the former!
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
I don't think OP understands languages or language acquisition. They seem to believe that vocab and grammar can be "learned separately", and is considering a rules-based approach for implementing language grammars.
It's not primarily rules based as that would be impossible to scale. Where rules are helpful is to provide principles for when a longer or shorter phrase is chosen.
Optimising the tradeoff between more frequent repetition of vocabulary versus better quality grammar examples is where a lot of the work is.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
I tried that app and it looks good. It was a bit hard for me to decide what book to choose. Question: do users later get quizzed on the words they looked up?
Not currently, but it's definitely something I want to add soon.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
Why the developer doesn’t make this app available in all regions beats me. If you’re reading this, please do so so I can download it.
I'll look to make it available in more regions soon. I just need to check the copyright limitations for the eBooks made available in the app.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
I have to admit I don't quite understand this.
Does it just replace words on a word-by-word basis? But the ordering of words in English is different from the ordering of words in other languages. How is this not going to teach you terrible grammar?
Looking at one of the screenshots, for instance, it translated "they had met their dead father" as "they had recontré leur mort father." But in French "mort" would come after "père."
Thanks for the feedback.
This is something that will improve over time - as it gets better at identifying longer phrases I can implement rules so it won't omit a neighbouring noun if the phrase contains a verb.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
Sounds great. Any plans for a visionOS app? I think this would be the perfect use case for it.
Something I'd love to look at longer-term. I think an overlay onto the real world that slowly immersed you in a new language would be a really powerful way to learn.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
Many thanks for all of the positive feedback today, lots of good ideas for me to get working on; what a great community!
Side-note: A few eBooks are causing errors on the backend that don't appear to be DRM-related. I will prioritise getting this fixed.
jonathanb88 commented on Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language glossarie.app/... · Posted by u/jonathanb88
It only works with iOS 17.0+
Could you make it work with any versions lower than 17.0?
I'll take a look. I think there were a couple of features that required 17.0+, but I may be able to solve with an earlier version.
French, Italian and Spanish all share the same root and English borrows a lot of words from the three of them (plus the alphabet and the indo-european origin).
I expect the app still works well for reinforcing vocabulary, but less well for demonstrating grammar.