Foreign Dispatch: Ideas from code editors applied to foreign language writing
harry.vangberg.nameNote you might be interested in looking at interactive machine translation systems and the associated research papers - for example Lilt [1, 2] or TransSmart [3, 4] - while those are designed for professional translators rather than for language learners, what they do is very similar to your long-term aims for this project (a specialized MT system that, given a partially written translation to the foreign language and some context written in in the user's native language, suggests the following word).
[1] https://lilt.com/technology/translate [2] https://lilt.com/research [3] https://transmart.qq.com/ [4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.13072.pdf
Very interesting, I will look into that. Thank you!
I think it should be "Ich ziehe Sauerteig vor." (or in past tense, "Ich zog Sauerteig vor"). "Zuge" is not a word[1]. So yes, a kind of spelling+grammar linter would be great I guess!
I mixed it up with bevorzugen[1] I think. Will fix it, thanks! :)
I had this idea (and way down the list on things i planned executing on) but I'm very glad you're doing it so I can enjoy it without having to
Great idea. I wanted to use pmd to learn some subtle aspects of Java. Tool-assisted learning. It's either operate on existing code and learn the conventions and techniques, or write hundreds of programs in the language.
From a maintenance perspective, it's a superpower.
I thought the idea sounded interesting, but it appears to be very narrowly focused on the problem of "I'd like to write something in [German], but I don't know [German] all that well". I'm more interested in the problem of "I'd like to read something in [German]". The "right way" to solve the problem of knowing how to write something in German is, unfortunately, to read several dozen examples of people writing similar things.
Dictionary entries are complex things. (Well, often they aren't, but they should be. The amount of information one dictionary entry needs to provide is quite large.) I don't see a lot of value in having the editor pop up abbreviated dictionary entries for words that I know I need to look up. If I know that, I can look up the word in a high-quality dictionary and benefit from a much fuller entry.
> I'm more interested in the problem of "I'd like to read something in [German]"
Something can be done here. Books with aligned/inlined/popup translations, tracking known/unknown vocabulary, spaced repetition for new words.
It does not seem to be developed anymore, but Readlang[1] does exactly that. It has been very helpful early on as I was learning Spanish and German.
The OA, and your comment, made me very excited at the prospect of building a kickass AI-assisted language-learning suite. I think interactive writing is a great foundational abstraction, and your description -- of reading a bunch of examples in the native language saying similar things -- would be a beautiful way to realize it: a write, read, write, read, write REPL. Mix in spaced rep and conversation with a partner (conversations would be much less tedious as part of this loop) and you have a language learning hyper-accelerator.
I'm what people in the Midwest [1] call "good with languages" in that I have learned a host of them to intermediate level, and then run aground on getting to advanced, which I think of as the ability to express yourself colloquially and elegantly on any random topic. An IDE like we're talking about would be a godsend, not least because it would speed things up between ten and a hundred-fold.
Argh, I'm tempted to quit my fucking job and try to make this exist, though I'm not qualified to build it. Maybe someone else will do something comparable -- definitely a "take my money" example :)
[1] I mention being from the Midwest bc, when I was growing up, average small-town people lacked any real access or exposure to (or motivation to acquire) other languages. When I got old enough to travel (also not a thing generally done in my social setting), running into people fluent in 4 languages just by accident of birth, would always make me so jealous :/
> I have learned a host of them to intermediate level, and then run aground on getting to advanced, which I think of as the ability to express yourself colloquially and elegantly on any random topic.
If this is your standard, then to within rounding error, 0% of people have reached an "advanced" level in their own native language(s). Elegance is difficult.
(Though some people do seem to believe in a similar standard. My sister grew up in the United States, in an exclusively English-speaking household, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the state department and took their English ability test (I assume for fun). She scored less than fluent - according to the rubric, not qualified to talk to Anglophone college graduates.
I can attest personally that college graduates don't seem to mind if you, as a foreigner, don't know the specialized vocabulary they learned in college.)
I think you and I have a different notion of what "elegance" means. To me, it's not that high a bar. A native speaker who reads for fun and cares about self-expression generally achieves it. It does, however, prove a high bar for a non-native speaker in my experience.
That's a good approach: one should read many examples in German to learn writing it that way, whether fiction, or news, or mathematics.
Foreign Dispatch looks to eventually be an ensemble of tools. Autocomplete being the first, with one-for-one analogs of programming: linter, in-line documentation, and language server.
Going back to your writing concept, how cool would it be to pop up snippets of German literature for similar sentences in context? That would be neat.
This is very similar to Vim's built-in "thesaurus completions": https://vimhelp.org/insert.txt.html#compl-thesaurus
Love the idea! Are you planning to keep the core tool stack OSS? Would love to contribute to growing the project in the long term. I imagine there could be avenues for monetization while keeping it OSS (e.g. Licence for business use)
No plans to monetize. Contributions very welcome! :)
Wonderful idea, Viel Glück.