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At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
20 hours a week of intensive instruction.
Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks
This is what it actually takes.
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
jpcom commented on Show HN: Aiko – Talk to Your Japanese Tutor AI, Powered by XAI and Polly japanesecomplete.com/aiko... · Posted by u/jpcom
This submitter under other usernames sova and cushpush, have been promoting their japanesecomplete site since 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=japanesecomplete.com) and miso site since 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=miso.beehiiv.com) against the HN guidelines on self-promotion. Turning on "showdead" reveals more of the history for those interested.
Also, there are four previous postings under the sova account, so this is not exactly new. Show HN is not for advertising products.
- Aiko: Learn Japanese Effortlessly, with MMLM-Powered Digital Sensei (japanesecomplete_com/aiko-announcement) 2 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko, learn Japanese rapidly with her help (japanesecomplete_com/aiko-announcement) 1 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko: MMLM (Multimodal Language Model)-Powered Digital Sensei for Japanese (japanesecomplete_com/articles/?p=1574) 3 points | sova | 1 year ago
- Aiko – A New Wave in Learning Japanese – AI-Powered Digital Sensei (japanesecomplete_com/articles/?p=1536) 6 points | sova | 1 year ago
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You can use the product for free at the link I shared for Show HN. It is true this is incorporated into the broader lesson plan now, but initially I had just worked it out as a demo and was excited to show it to the community. I appreciate your vigilance although can't help but think it's misplaced.
For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i also have the AI integrated well with the IDE.
The biggest wins are the times you hit a new framework/library. Traditionally you'd go through the 'search for code samples on usage of new library/language/framework -> work those samples into a form that accomplishes your task' cycle. AI is much better for this to the extent it even often surprises me. "Oh the library has a more straightforward way to accomplish X than i thought!".
For those who are still skeptical it's time to try it again.