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Comment by klez | Hacker News Reader

<useless_rant>

Why are all those sites english->whatever-language and not whatever-language->whatever-other-language?

I know it can be long to translate everything, but once you have a English->French course and an English->Italian course, why can't we have a French->Italian one (and vice versa)?

</useless_rant>

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Because going between any two languages is a separate task. Unless you have a universal language that contains every linguistic feature everywhere and can achieve lossless transition, using X->Y and X->Z to make Y->Z will introduce an unacceptable level of error. English is not a universal language.

In the 80's the Wang corporation (of Wang wordprocessing fame) was working on using Aymara as such a bridge language. I don't know what happened to the project.

My Natural Language Systems professor just went through that topic yesterday -- that in the case of all machine translation applications, the ultimate goal is to get as high up in a 'natural language pyramid' where the tip is a single universal language. So we get the most use out of elements of any two given languages that have as much in common with each other as possible; these common elements could then be applied to other similar languages.

Interestingly, he also proposed that the closest thing we have right now to that 'tip' language is sanskrit.

I think most people who are serious about learning a foreign language either want to learn English or already speak it. It's relatively rare for, say, a person who speaks only Spanish to start studying Mandarin without even basic fluency in English.

The content on memrise is by large contributed by users. I've created a Portuguese->Spanish course there, and so have other people.

Noone is stopping you from creating a French->Italian course. Add 10 words a day and soon you'll have a basic course.

Actually it does have a lot of x language->y language courses, when browsing courses you can select the base language on the left where it says 'For [English] speakers'. (Though it appears there isn't a french->italian course...)

I was interested in Italian>Whatever (sorry, I inverted them in my first post). There only seems to be Italian>Mandarin. Though luck...

Anyway thanks for the suggestion.

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