I feel like my experience with Show HN has been pretty confusing.
Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails.
I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources.
I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets.
Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest.
I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do.
Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.
Not really. Fluency is probably closer to 70-95% comprehension, combined with an ability to assume the rest. I assume the comment is talking about native level comprehension, which is still only like 99.99%
Source: native English speaker in Europe. I have to explain/reword several words/expressions per day to people who would be by all means considered fluent.
(all numbers in this comment were estimated based on experience)
I wouldn't consider anyone "fluent" who has only 70% comprehension. More like 90%+. If you're assuming things based on context that is a marker of a low level of comprehension.
Im also a native English speaker and have to explain English words daily to other native English speakers. Dont really think that matters. Some words are more common than others.
I would say "full comprehension" would mean you don't need words and phrases explained to you on a daily basis.
And to each their own. Fluency is a bad metric because it means something different to everyone. If you live in a language, work in a language, and have friends in a language, most people would consider that fluent. I've met many, many people who qualify with a much lower comprehension level than 90%.
Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension.
I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency".
"Also, speaking from experience, I'll often "comprehend a sentence 100% in another language". Then I'll really listen to it again and realize I'm not really sure about half of the words. I have a vague idea of most of them and in context my brain get's it and self-reports full comprehension.
I think "full comprehension" is a substantially higher bar than "fluency"."
I get it, and in my experience, when I find myself relistening and not being sure about "half the words," it means Im not fluent!
I wasn’t claiming fluency in these languages, just making a point that comprehension is normally very over-exaggerated, and that “full comprehension” is a long way off from just average “comprehension”, and in most cases not needed to converse/listen/read. A big part of fluency is being able to deal with a certain level of ambiguity
Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.
This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...
Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.
I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)
This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.
I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.
So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)
Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!
Għadni kemm bdejt nitgħallem il-Malti! I'm using my own app, and I don't want to link it here given it's someone else's launch post, but you can find many links in my profile. But if you're a self-directed type of learner, I've been making sure it works well with Maltese :)
Please get in touch if you have any questions! The setup process is hit and miss, but there's a telegram community for members with many happy customers. I'm there all the time and we're all happy to help!
Plus it would be awesome to get more Maltese learners. I have no one to gush about this language with :D
Not yet! I speak some Italian and want to learn Arabic. I found out there was a semitic language with Italian vocabulary in the latin script and that's what started my obsession.
Actually to be completely honest, I learned about Maltese, checked my app, and saw it supported Maltese. That night I was learning a language with an app I'd previously built without even knowing the language existed. That's what started my obsession with it.
Then turns out it's an island in an awesome location with an even cooler history. And it uses the letter Ħ
Visually I’m working on a new landing page for phrasing. It’s almost done, just need to record a few videos: https://phrasing.app/next
Behind the scenes I’m rebuilding the sync engine to properly support offline mode. Trying to get to instant opens for the app (and of course work offline). It’s probably my 5th sync engine. It’s been really fun to see how much easier, faster, better, etc each new iteration is.
(And the project at large is https://phrasing.app - a language learning app for polyglots. It’s like anki but designed to be enjoyed)
The short intro video is helpful in understanding what Phrasing does. The promised walk-though video would also be helpful. I am interested in software for aiding language learning, but after reading your original landing page I could not understand what exactly Phrasing is or what it does. I'm looking forward to trying this out some time this week with my target language. Nice work!
Thanks for the kind words! The promised walk through will maybe come hopefully this weekend, give or take a few days.
Can I ask if the new page explained it better? The “demo/how it works” section is still missing the graphics, which I think is pretty critical. But I’m hoping the new page is a bit improvement!
One of the pieces of feedback I get most often from users is “oh this is actually really simple”. But explaining it simply has always eluded me
> It’s very plausible (and increasingly likely) that OpenAI/Anthropic are profitable on a per-token marginal basis
Can you provide some numbers/sources please? Any reporting I’ve seen shows that frontier labs are spending ~2x on inference than they are making.
Also making the same query on a smaller provider (aka mistral) will cost the same amount as on a larger provider (aka gpt-5-mini) despite the query taking 10-100x longer on OpenAI.
I can only imagine that is OpenAI subsidizing the spend. GPUs cost by the second for inference. Either that or OpenAI hasn’t figured out how to scale but I find that much less likely
Very happy with all the mistral work. I feel like I'm always one release behind theirs. Last time they released Mistral 3 I commented saying how excited I was to try it out [1]
Well, I'm happy to report I integrated the new Mistral 3 and have been truly astounded by the results. I still am not a big fan of the model wrt factual information - it seems to be especially confident and especially wrong if left to it's own devices - but with http://phrasing.app I do most of the data aggregation myself and just use an LLM to format it. Mistral 3 was a drop-in replacement for 3x the quality (it was already very very good), 0% error rate for my use case (I had an issue for it occasionally going off the rails that was entirely solved), and sticks to my formatting guidelines perfectly (which even gpt-5-pro failed on). Plus it was somehow even cheaper.
I'm using Scribe v2 at the moment for TTS, but I'm very excited now to try integrating Voxtral Transcribe. The language support is a little lacking for my use cases, but I can always fall back to Scribe and amatorize the cost across languages. I actually was due to work on the transcription of phrasing very soon so I guess look forward to my (hopefully) glowing review on their next hn launch! XD
I’m building a language learning app [https://phrasing.app] and this is really good advice. I’ve not had any interest in SST for the application, and have no plans to integrate it. In my experience, I’ve never seen them be truly beneficial in the language learning process.
What has been extremely beneficial has been having the text and audio forced aligned and highlighted, kareoke-style, every time I hear the audio. It has improved my phoneme recognition remarkably well with remarkably little content. Several users also report the same thing - that even native speech feels a lot more like separate words than just a slew of sounds. I attribute this in large part just due to this kareoke style audio. It works better for phonetic scripts, so I would recommend using this with pinyin/jyutping/furigana for character based languages.
For production, when I was at Regina Coeli (world-class language institute) their main thing was just 1. you hear a short passage in Dutch, 10-40 words 2. you record yourself reading the same passage and 3. you play back the two audio tracks on top of one another and listen for the difference. Optional step 4. Re-record and replay until it’s close enough.
There was no grading, no teacher checking recordings, no right or wrong; just hundreds of random sentences and a simple app to layer them. You needed to learn to hear the differences yourself and experiment until you no longer could. (fwiw this is not present in phrasing, I just found it relevant. One day soon I hope to add it!)
I recently started learning a tonal language, and so far have not struggled too much wrt tones when everything is slow. There was an original strangeness and refusal for my vocal cords to want to work that way, but probably only for the first month or so.
At least, this is the case for slow text. Once the text is sped up it’s amazing how my brain just stops processing that information. Both listening and speaking.
I’m sure this will come with practice and time but for now I find it fascinating
Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails.
I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources.
I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets.
Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest.
I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do.
Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.
reply