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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

> I learned Turkish with lairner itself

Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?

> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.

I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?

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Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.

This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.

That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...

Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?

My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.

I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).

I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)

This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.

I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.

So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)

Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!

>How can you go to <INSERT_PLACE> if you haven't been there before.

If the point of learning a language was to say new words to yourself, you can just make up words.

If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.

I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.

All of those stories are cool, I enjoyed reading them.

However, the app exists ... and it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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