When I saw a great Show HN post yesterday about a language learning with real-world content, I started to sweat a bit; the headline matched what I had been working on with a friend! But it turns out that we went in totally different directions, and I figured it was as good a time as any to share.
Here's our interpretation of the Duo-style experience with real-world content: the inContext notebook. I like to think of it as lowering the activation energy of reading native-level content in a foreign language. The user reads a short passage that's roughly at their level and then they answer content questions and review vocab from the passage. As for what the topic of the passage is... you choose! Provide a link or text and bam.
In my experience with language learning, one of the most annoying phases is when you know some stuff but you still have to keep grinding the textbook because all the real content is too difficult. Hopefully this makes that period a bit more interesting, and gets the learner there faster.
Some notes on usage after testing for a few weeks:
- if you are not sure where to find articles, try Google Discover.
- this technically works in translation as well but for best results use a source written in the target language.
Technical things:
- after quite a bit of testing and iterating, we found Claude 3.5 Sonnet works best at naturalness of text, quality of story, question quality, etc.
- in the future we'd like to try use a fine tuned or trained model but so far we don't have anything that works better than this.
dothereading|11 months ago
Here's our interpretation of the Duo-style experience with real-world content: the inContext notebook. I like to think of it as lowering the activation energy of reading native-level content in a foreign language. The user reads a short passage that's roughly at their level and then they answer content questions and review vocab from the passage. As for what the topic of the passage is... you choose! Provide a link or text and bam.
In my experience with language learning, one of the most annoying phases is when you know some stuff but you still have to keep grinding the textbook because all the real content is too difficult. Hopefully this makes that period a bit more interesting, and gets the learner there faster.
Some notes on usage after testing for a few weeks:
- if you are not sure where to find articles, try Google Discover.
- this technically works in translation as well but for best results use a source written in the target language.
Technical things:
- after quite a bit of testing and iterating, we found Claude 3.5 Sonnet works best at naturalness of text, quality of story, question quality, etc.
- in the future we'd like to try use a fine tuned or trained model but so far we don't have anything that works better than this.
Open to any feedback on UX or anything else!