[anavat]

Thanks for working on this! Language learning really needs a breakthrough.

Now, I tried the web app and chose to learn Greek as a beginner. And while I had better experience with your app than with ChatGPT or Gemini voice modes, I still got lost 5 minutes in because the AI tutor doesn't seem to have a plan for me, nor does it "see" my struggles. For example, after asking me about a hobby, it gives me a long sentence in Greek about how how it is nice to hike in mountains. Being absolute noob I cannot reply to it, nor even repeat it. And I don't even know what it is expected from me at the moment. A human tutor here would probably repeat a part of the sentence with a translation and ask me to repeat, or would explain something. The AI just sits there waiting for me to make a sound, and when I make it, it goes on on a tangental subject of beach vacations. :)

Again, this is still relatively not bad, and I'm going to give it another try.

[drakonka]

I had a similar feeling with Swedish just now. It isn't really much different than conversing with ChatGPT in advanced voice mode - it's up to me to drive the conversation and it all feels quite arbitrary (and I find myself instinctively falling back on topics I know how to talk about, which quite defeats the purpose). I was hoping for a more structured learning plan that strategically expands my comfort zone and skills in a guided way.

[mariano54]

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah we need to improve the beginner experience, it's more tailored towards intermediate/advanced students at the moment.

[sotix]

Language Transfer[0] will continue to be a better resource than any AI course. It’s very hard to beat a human that has put in time crafting a logical way to teach a language with the appropriate ramp ups. The Greek course on there is fantastic. And it’s free with zero ads. Best language learning tool I’ve ever used period.

[0]: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

[simonbarker87]

Agree, it was a game changer for me with Spanish. Learning a second language is just plain hard and LT is the closest to “a breakthrough” I think we will get, but it’s still hard and people don’t like that.

[candiddevmike]

What's the best way to listen to this on your mobile in a way that will remember your location? SoundCloud app?

[frank20022]

Agreed, languagetransfer is fantastic. Much better than any "AI tutor".

[sirodoht]

Funnily enough I said my native language is Greek but then it responded with an error and reset my onboarding guide. Then, I lied that my native language is English, which worked. But now it calls me Anton, rather than the name I said I have!

[dbuxton]

I also got Anton. Looks like something's hard coded - or maybe a caching issue?

[kevmo314]

I think this is a pretty big limitation of the architecture (STT->LLM->TTS) they've chosen. The intonation around struggling to speak or difficulty with certain phrases is totally lost when the text is transcribed.

[mattbee]

I paid for Memrise to polish up French. The scripted lessons alwere great but it dropped me into an AI conversation assistant that did exactly the same. It forgot the vocab and grammar level that the scripted lessons had taught, and often broke into idiom. I haven't picked it up since.

[Nadya]

I'm a Memrise beta member w/ lifetime premium access for my contributions to the site in its early days. I cannot recommend anyone use Memrise for anything nowadays it has been so heavily enshittified. In fact, I recommend against using it in favor of Anki (Memrise's biggest strength over Anki in the early days was the community mnemonics and courses (Anki equivalent "community decks") - none of which really exist in any way today).

I tried following the modern Japanese track on Memrise and was appalled at how bad it is nowadays.

[koakuma-chan]

I think the point here is for you to practice (i.e. develop "muscle memory" for speaking), not to learn.

[thaumasiotes]

As far as using language goes, those aren't different things.