Alternatives
Products that do what Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news does
I've been working on a little side project that combines Duolingo-like listening comprehension exercises with real content . Every video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough for these short exercises. Would love your thoughts!
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Hi HN, I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory. Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!
2024 · platoedu.org
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Hi! Wanted to share the project I really wanted to have. TLDR; this app lets you create your own list of words and you get a Duolingo-like experience (kind of, still needs a lot of features) practicing those words in their context. My English is not the best but not the worst either. But I realized I can't boost it up after a certain level! In my belief, in order to truly learn a language, you need to be exposed to that language often. Vocabulary is the key factor here if you really want to improve in any language. My experience is that when I read a book to improve my English vocabulary, I…
2025 · github.com
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Hi! I'm living as an expat in France and I had a hard time following the news. So I've been working on Fluentsubs that turns YouTube content into a language learning experience. YouTube videos up to 20 minutes can be transcribed and listened to. At the same time I made it easy to lookup certain words and automatically add spaced repetition cards using the given context. This means that you can also rehearse with a real voice and not with AI dubs. This works especially well for the somewhat smaller languages that have a small track on Duolingo, and now are desperately looking for content…
2025 · fluentsubs.com
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I'm launching UneeBee, an open-source tool for creating interactive courses like Duolingo: GitHub repo: https://github.com/zoonk/uneebee Demo: https://app.uneebee.com/ It's pretty early-stage, so there's a lot of things to improve. Everything on this project is going to be public, so you can check the roadmap on GitHub too: https://github.com/orgs/zoonk/projects/11 I'm creating this project because I love Duolingo and I wanted the same kind of experience to learn other things as well. But I think this could be useful to other…
2023 · uneebee.com
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Hey folks! I'm Callum, and I'm working on a way to practice a new language with an AI powered tutor. I've always found that the hardest part of learning a new language is finding someone to actually converse with. Even if a partner can be found, the pressure can mean that you are more focused on not making mistakes than on actually learning new grammar or vocabulary. The service that I have been working on allows you to practice with a language tutor via online chat messages, or you can have a turn-based voice conversation. I'm working on a number of other features that will be coming out…
2023 · learnlingo.dev
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Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds their base forms (lemmas) and groups the examples by the lemma. At some point I realised that I have a transcription with word level timestamps that opens a lot of other opportunities. So I added a mode to click the first and last word in the transcript and it starts looping with the right gap and repeat count. Another feature I use a lot is selecting an audio fragment, sending a predefined prompt…
Jun 2026 · lingochunk.com
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Hello Hacker News, When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking. # The product *What I have now:* * Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language. * Feedback on your grammar. * Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing. * Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels. * Translations: Click to see a…
2023 · gliglish.com
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Hi HN! I have been working on a webapp to keep learning German and today I want to share the first version. In the past, I have used books with "Short stories" to learn the language and I always wanted more stories so I thought I could put that into an app. Short stories are nice because the learner can attempt to understand words from the context of the text and it feels like less effort than a traditional language app. Additionally, the app format allows for practice questions at the end and you can use LLMs to check whether the answers are correct; so the users can check themselves. So…
2023 · webbu.app
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Hi HN, I’m Pablo, I built this application to learn languages using podcasts: https://www.langturbo.com (No signup required) There are a lot of tools to learn languages, but most of them focus on beginners (understandably so, that’s where the money is) but not many exist that target intermediate or advanced learners. The ones that exist make you find content on your own and then import that into their apps, which can be tricky when you don’t know where to look. LangTurbo has a unique curated database of podcasts by language (some even have dialect labels) that you can browse by…
2025 · langturbo.com
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2022 · roshi.ai
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Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
Dec 2025 · lingoku.ai
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I've been learning Japanese for a few years and kept running into a similar problem. I'd find a video I wanted to learn from, hear a useful sentence, and then realise that turning that sentence into something I could study later was both time consuming and draining at times. I would end up jumping between a video player, subtitles/transcription, a dictionary, screenshots, audio clips and Anki. So I built SubSmith to bring that workflow together. You can drop a video or audio file into it, generate a transcript locally and then use the transcript alongside the media to: * look up words…
9d ago · subsmith.app
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As hard as I tried, I didn't find a modern language learning book that's either very academic, or like "master a language with my super-magic great method in 3 months". So I dug into the academic research, tried many techniques myself, saw what worked, wrote a book for learners of any language and any level, and made it free without ads. Today, finally, a 2 years-long project ends. I hope it helps anyone. Book's here: https://thehardway.guide/ Cheers
2023
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