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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

im re-visiting learning Spanish in my spare time and am working with Babbel, LingoDeer and a pretty good independent site morpheem (https://morpheem.org/) that has the heaviest use of AI of all three. I didn't even consider duolingo as LingoDeer is generally better in the "cutesy gamified language learning" space.

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Curious if you have tried (or heard of) spanishdictionary.com? I work on it, and our users seem to like it and find it effective. The name is a bit misleading—started out as a dictionary but now has a full curriculum up through a couple years of college Spanish. We don’t really do any paid marketing (or any other kind for that matter) so I’m always curious about whether people have heard of it.

Someone mentioned on r/DuoLingo so I installed in order to try it. My biggest problem with it was the UI and lack of options to configure it. I would really like options to make fonts and buttons bigger. Altough I changed phone font size in order to use app, small height of buttons on the bottom are really getting on my nerves.

I'll pass this along! Since you mentioned installing, I'm assuming this was an app, not web. Android or iOS?

Android App via PlayStore...

I will try it. From my other comments you can gather I'm a sad lifelong monolinguist despite having a terrific Spanish foundation in middle school, and I can hardly imagine ever being conversational. But it's only been a week

I use spanishdictionary.com (both the app and website) all the time for when I forget a word or conjugation, I really like it for that. The fact that when I type in a word in either language and hit enter, it goes straight to the page for the definition and translation to the other language is great UX (i.e. not dumping me to a search results screen, or making me toggle between languages)

I think it got me to try out a lesson a while back but it felt kinda half-baked and I never continued further.

My biggest issue with the site/app is the constant splash-screens/pop-up modals that take over the app/website to try and get me to upgrade. I get you guys want to funnel people towards the subscription, but being nagged daily when I'm just trying to look up a word is not making me more likely to bite.

If you tried the lessons more than a couple years ago, it may be worth revisiting. I hear you about the marketing stuff. FWIW, if you create an account (totally free, no CC needed or anything like that), you will see less of it.

I'll give it a shot, thanks!

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