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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

I am currently in Uruguay learning Spanish and Duolingo is one the the 4 tools I use on my phone for it. The other three are:

Ankidroid: A flashcard app for adding vocabulary I need and phrases I want to come more fluidly.

Spanish Trainer: A spaced repetition verb conjugation app as Duolingo doesn't give me enough practice with this.

Google Translate

What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import translations from Google Translate into my flashcard app.

Duolingo needs to provide better user control of the spaced repitition input and some setting for the skills practice sessions. I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know. I would also love the ability to mark certain words or drills as important or useful so that they get repeated more frequently when practicing skills.

(Edited for formatting and the friendly grammar red cross :))

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> What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import translations from Google Translate into my flashcard app.

You might like to try my webapp for reading and learning a language:

http://readlang.com

It allows you to read shared texts or upload your own (.txt or .epub) or read any web page with a Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readlang-web-reade...)

You can click or drag across any word or phrase to get an instant translation.

Every translation is converted into a flashcard, along with the context sentence.

You can practice with Readlang's own spaced repetition flashcards or export to Anki if you prefer.

Hope you find it useful!

(I've been bootstrapping this for the past 2.5 years)

That looks helpful I'll give it a try, what source do you use for your translations?

The in-line translations come from Google Translate. People often dismiss Google Translate but it's very good between English and the other major European languages. The quality isn't as good for less popular languages, or if one of your languages isn't English.

If you aren't satisfied with the translation, you can refer to another dictionary in the reader sidebar (or a popup window in the Chrome extension). The default for Spanish-English is WordReference, but users can customize this if they have another favorite (http://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.html).

On top of that, you can edit all the words you translate, and if in future you click the same word, you'll get your personally edited version instead of Google Translate. So you're effectively building up your own large translation dictionary. One idea for the future is to use all these edits to crowd source better translations, but there's plenty of lower hanging fruit to get through first!

This is a really cool product. I am surprised at both the quality of translation and the seamless integration into the page. I am definitely going to be using this.

Great job!

Great service. I hate these language learning websites that make me type out all the vocabulary so much.

Your's is almost exactly what I was looking for for a long time.

> I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know.

It's my understanding that Duolingo (and similar tools) aren't quizzing you just to make you prove that you know a word. It's actually part of the process of ensuring retention, and the act of recalling the word is actually part of the process of storing the information more permanently in the brain. Therefore, the ability to mark a word as "learned" may be counterproductive long-term. Of course, the algorithm isn't perfect, but it's more advanced than simply checking off a box that you've learned the word and never need to practice it again.

That being said, I do agree that more customization would be helpful.

I don't need to have certain words drilled into me because I've known them for over a decade. I also know what words come easily and immediately when I am trying to speak and thus are drilled into me by constant use.

The two other spaced repetition tools I use (which I mentioned) allow me to specify how well I know the answer and use when I have a high level of confidence in my knowledge, the words will come less frequently.

(edit: added second paragraph)

For vocabulary, http://memrise.com and http://quizlet.com are good. Memrise's flash cards (or "mems" as they call them) are quite good.

Do they make you write your answers? I find that to be a crucial feature.

Also memrise doesn't understand language the way duolingo does. The latter actually uses words in context, both in fragments of sentences and full sentences. These count as repetitions for the individual sentences, and there always seem to be some fresh sentences.

I think these differences make Duolingo a much superior tool as far as there courses go.

agreed. I've tried several language learning products and found memrise helped me retain a lot more than any other

> Duolingo needs to provide better user control of the spaced repitition input and some setting for the skills practice sessions.

I disagree. I think what Duolingo needs is to do a better job of automatically detecting people's personal spacing and on which words (this isn't a trivial problem, BTW). Putting this burden on the user means that the user spends a lot of time tinkering with the platform instead of actually learning the language. This is a problem I ran into with Anki.

Welcome to our little country! Where do you come from? What's your mother tongue?

Seconded :) . I wonder whether might have enough HN users to have a meetup here.. (are HN meetups still occurring on other places? Maybe I should Ask HN).

Thirded! If you do a meetup in late December / early January I may be there :)

It would be awesome to hear about your experiences with Google :) and now with your new company (and book writing too !! )

I used similar materials, and I found The Foreign Services Institute's course workbooks (1989) [0] as a helpful supplement for learning Spanish – and they have courses for 37 other languages, all free (PDFs and MP3s).

They courses were intended for international diplomats preparing for exams or relocation that require (at the least) conversational proficiency in their destination's local language. So, you learn the basics as quickly as possible without compromising understanding for rote memorization.

[0] http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/

> I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know.

Do you know what you know, though? It's easy to spend an hour practising a bunch of words and feel as though you've learnt some of them, but come back a week or month later and actually not be able to recall them.

Some Spanish words are almost exactly the same as their English or Dutch equivalent, in which case I really don't need them repeated. I think this is the case for others too.

("What sped things up for me" or I suppose you could say "What speeds things up for me;" hope this is received well by commenter HN community in the spirit of helping someone learn/improve their language)

I would have used the form, "What sped things up for me." when describing something that happened in the past. "What speeds things up for me" is a different sense - it's talking about the present.

That isn't a correction. Both "sped things" and "speeds things" are both legal English and both mean similar things (although as another commenter correctly notes, the tenses are subtly different).

Downvoters can read this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/114620/speeded-v...

Sped is a perfectly valid English word. If you don't believe so then you should question your own knowledge of the language.

Neither are legal English.

In this context 'legal' can only mean 'having to do with the law' as there is no statutory definition of the English language (well not British English at least).

What I should have written was "What would speed things up for me"

Ah, I thought it was a feature that was already available; I've not deeply used Duolingo yet.

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