ABAL: All Books, All Languages
abal.ai"All Books, All Languages", or ABAL for short, is a modern, web-based, parallel text language-learning application that I've been working on as a side project for about a year. I've already received a lot of great feedback about the application among language learners. In addition to what I hope is an intuitive UI/UX, one of the unique things about ABAL is the way that pronunciations are customized to a user's native and target languages.
Systems like IPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...) don't make pronunciation any easier to get right for a majority of - if not all - language learners. ABAL solves this by showing phonetic hints that are written in the user's native language script and are meant to be pronounced in the native language's voice.
The name All Books, All Languages is intentionally quixotic, as it serves to set the ambitious and unreachable goal of hosting all of humanity's written works while making them available to all language learners and readers across the globe!
Today, it hosts a number of generated short stories categorized by subject and CEFR level. I'm currently working on supporting (private) self-uploaded files, and works in the public domain. Work is also going into adding support for more languages, while evaluating and optimizing for cross-language translations accuracy.
It currently supports 56 languages (including Klingon and Latin!) - which comes out to 3080 permutations - or 3080 unique user profiles as I like to think of it. Both the marketing and application sites are fully internationalized - even response messages in 4xx responses use i18n. Quite a bit of work went into automating the i18n diff generation system to make sure I can release UI/UX changes quickly.
I hope you'll find it useful if you're learning a new language or need to practice one you already know. If you're not learning a new language, but wish you could read classics in a language you're fluent in, stay tuned!
UX feedback: I don't think asking users to choose a theme should be the first thing they see. Use the prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature by default. More fine-grained control can be somewhere in advanced settings.
Also, I think you're relying too heavily on AI translation.
E.g. in the German interface, both "Intermediate" and "Advanced" translate as "Fortgeschritten", making the level-selection dropdown rather confusing. Your example texts have obvious translation mistakes. The phonetic hints are also completely off at least some of the time. And of course even if they were perfect, they don't help to distinguish phonemes that both map to the same representation in the target script.
In its current state, I think anyone using your project to learn a language would be actively harmed by it.
I agree it's far from perfect. In addition to the existing "beta" label, I'll consider adding a disclaimer/warning to users that the system is still in beta and will suffer from inaccuracies in translation.
What am I doing to fix this long term?
I'm currently building an optimization mechanism to ensure the highest quality translations for any given language pair.
I really appreciate your detailed feedback. Do let me know if anything else comes to mind.
Great UX、TTS has reading with 「"」double quote (by default)
Good eye! Thank you.