Show HN: PhrasePump: Learn Languages by Listening to Tatoeba Sentences
languagereactor.com
About a year ago Me and Og started to make a flashcard function for 'Language Learning with Netflix'/Language Reactor, as exporting to Anki was a bit of a painful process for users. During development, some opportunities presented themselves:
Why teach a word with a single saved sentence, when you can vary the sentence every session?
Isn't sound the primary medium of language? Let's make it a big listening practice.
Why do I have to go looking to words to save? Let the software suggest what to learn.
It's called PhrasePump because it relentlessly firehoses phrases at you. If you are happy to be thrown in the pool at the deep end, it actually makes a pretty nice way to start to learn a language. The tool knows about word frequencies, but it's completely grammar-deaf. All tenses are thrown at you from the beginning. But brains are quite good at picking out patterns, learning this way is quite exciting.
Sentences are read using the latest neural TTS. Items are scheduled using an advanced library, 'Ebisu'. You can use it to study about 40 languages, with any translation language. Words you learn are highlighted when you watch Netflix/Youtube (integrated with Language Reactor extension). It's free to use, but if you pay the cashcash, you can star specific phrases to review again and change the order in which you learn words. Free is fine though. It's a website, no app yet.
It's intended for desktop browsers, but actually Og patched up the code this evening so it's useable on mobile.