Show HN: Text editor with inline English-German dictionary

[ichverstehe]

Hi

When you are learning a new language, you need to practice different skills: reading, listening, speaking, writing. I find writing to be the hardest activity, not least because I have to look up words in the dictionary all the time, and that is a frustrating context switch.

Here is an experimental CodeMirror-based editor, that lets you look up translations inline. Type @ followed by the English word, and get a list of possible translations, and select the translation to apply it.

Online demo: https://foreign-dispatch-autocomplete.netlify.app/

[97-109-107]

This is very clever, I haven't seen such modal conventions for translation/substitution.

I think it's quite original to have the starting point of "I'm almost good enough to write on my own" in stead of starting in the usual spot of full-auto translation pipe dream.

I occasionally use deepl to write messages in languages which I'm rusty, but the-back-and-forth between editing my final output and selecting suggestions in not smooth.

[divyenduz]

This is very nice, I wrote something very similar for telegram, I don't maintain it anymore, love to see tools like this

- https://github.com/divyenduz/languagelearners - https://languagelearners.vercel.app/

[juujian]

Love that. I assume for learners an alternative mode would be great where it shows you the word but you still have to type it, just to build muscle memory.

[smcin]

Neat! Two issues I found:

1) if I type @being I get zero options, even though it's in the dict https://www.wikdict.com/de-en/being . I only get options for expanding @be

2) I can't expand @be/being into a noun ('Beings surrounded our ship'), only into a verb/gerund ('Being John Malkovich')

[juujian]

That is something which could be addressed by stemming or lemmatizing the input before piping it into whatever you use for translation.

[gumby]

Makes me wonder if you could reasonably write an LSP server for text and then plug it into your editor for on-the-fly autocomplete, translations etc?

[ichverstehe]

Definitely something I want to explore later on, if I can make the individual prototypes work well by themselves.

[vacooom]

That's a neat idea. Would love to have that as an Obsidian plugin!

[wklm]

great stuff, would love to have it as an outlook plugin

[agolio]

Super cool project!! I can really imagine this being helpful,

I love alternative language learning tools, also keen on for e.g., Language Learning with Netflix which lets you see dual subtitles while watching netflix.

I will drop my own (very naive, possibly incorrect) side project that I made while learning German myself, always happy for feedback! agol.io/trainer

[TurkishPoptart]

I love the reading and the explanations, it's all very clear, nice work! This trainer is cool, but maybe I'm too ignorant to understand the prompts. For example,

"Das Essen … Frau"

What case is it looking for? I assume it's nominative, but I don't know what the context is. But "die" is not accepted. Is it implied that "the food is eaten by the woman"?