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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

All language apps are destined to become essentially an SRS app, which at that point you might as well just use an anki.

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I disagree, the old HelloChinese course was great for covering Chinese character writing, as well as exercises with Pinyin and only Chinese characters, etc.

Unfortunately they've ramped up the monetisation and also become more like Duolingo with the streak-based stuff and fewer grammar notes.

old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.

How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the strokes for thousands of characters you will need something like SRS.

Spaced repetition is a highly effective method for learning languages, particularly for vocabulary/character acquisition, but it is not the only method and particular implementation of it in the software, really matters.

It is the only method in that it is a generic term. Without spacing there will be too many words to review at once. Without repetition it will be hard for people to learn things in one try. Spaced reputation is required to scale. But do language learning apps need to scale to handle a lot of information? Technically no, but the incentives around making apps make it so that SRS will added and dominate the product.

I will agree with you that the implementation matters, but ultimately anki will cover one's needs for SRS and open source efforts should go towards improving anki.

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