Show HN: I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app
phrasing.appHello HN -
Over the last few years, I've been building an app to learn languages. It supports ~85 languages and ~40 dialects, and is optimized for learning and maintaining multiple languages.
Learning a language is a ton of work, but really quite simple. Find text you're interested in, dissect and understand it, and review it often. Grind that every day for a few years, and you'll be fluent.
So I built Phrasing for 4 main reasons:
1. To have an app I would actually be excited to use every single day for years.
2. To do all the research, explanation, prioritization, course planning and management for me, so I could just focus on learning
3. To support learning multiple languages as a first class citizen
4. To have a nice, unified interface to learn languages from Spanish to Arabic to Cantonese
I've been using it daily now for almost a year to learn a variety of languages and I've been loving it. I have an awesome group of users in the Telegram channel who have been using it as well to great success.
If you're a polyglot, an avid language learner, or someone who tried to use Anki in the past but found it wasn't for them — I think you might really like Phrasing :)
EDIT: Phrasing is a paid application, but there are 30 expressions you can try for free in the islands tab (you'll see 10 of them in the onboarding flow as well)
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PS: Phrasing uses FSRS under the hood, so a huge thank you to the FSRS team and Jarrett Ye for all the amazing work. Phrasing would not be the product it is without you!
PSS: I'm documenting some of the latest updates on the blog this week, they're 50% product and 50% technical, might be of special interest to the HN crowd: https://phrasing.app/blog/launch-week-1 It looks cool, here's some feedback on the homepage: - it's really complex. It reads like a tech product instead of an accessible app. - i wish i could demo it with other languages on the homepage. Greek is, well, greek. I understand some Spanish and French so if i could use those as examples I could immediately "get" the effectiveness of the app by basing it on the knowledge I already have. I would recommend showcasing the most popular language. - should show the supported languages as icons with text above the fold. I'm always excited to learn about new language apps as duolingo is a bit basic! All great feedback! Thanks. Two questions if I may: 1. Where did the complexity start on the page for you? From the top it did it lose you somewhere? 2. Did you watch the video, and was that included in the complexity comment? Can’t say I’m able to quickly get to any of your feedback but I’ll take it to heart and apply it over the coming weeks/months :) Congrats on the innovative product and sticking with development! How has the translation quality changed / improved since this Show HN a couple years back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39177467 For languages not using the Roman alphabet, is it required that the user know the characters already? After registering but before starting a trial, I wasn’t clear on this. Some comparison of who should choose this over Duolingo and why (ie features) could be useful. Thank! Regarding the translation, Phrasing is Bring Your Own Content. In my initial launch, I used an official translation for the demo, but apparently chose poorly haha For languages without the Roman script - you can enter in qwerty (or configure it to work with any script). When you tap on a word, it shows you the phonetics; and if you tap on the shapes feature you can see that information for every word at the same time. The app will be default display everything in its native script intentionally. With a bit of curiosity, you’ll pick up the script soon enough. Normally within a few weeks for easier-from-latin scripts like Greek and Cyrillic, to a few months for harder scripts (although you’ll pick up the basics still in a few weeks). For Japanese and Chinese, I have more suggestions though. Which language(s) are you learning? Looks really expensive for a language learning app. Yeah I really spare no expense on the expressions. Makes them expensive, but also very effective Good luck! I'm glad to hear that FSRS becomes more and more popular! Thanks!! Omg I just realized you commented on my last post and I spelled your name wrong in my post. I’m so embarrassed, and that comment makes so much sense now XD I didn’t realize that was you