Alternatives
Products that do what Noviro does
A cleaner way to look up Mandarin words
- 1AJ
Hey HN, it’s been 8 years since I posted on here about the launch of my Japanese dictionary app Nihongo [0] and I’m finally back with a new app: Nihongo Lessons! Think of Nihongo Lessons as the textbook to Nihongo’s dictionary. It’s an app for learning Japanese, specifically made for learners who are serious about becoming fluent, and want a guided set of content that will help them efficiently acquire vocabulary and grammar. The project came about when Adam Shapiro of Japanese Level Up (Jalup) [1] announced last April that he was shutting Jalup down. As a fan of Adam’s work I was bummed to…
2022 · lessons.nihongo-app.com
- 2
- 3
- 4LJ
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
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8LA
Hi HN, I made Lingo - the SQLite of semantic search. I'm a self-taught developer and researcher who left school at 16, and I've spent some time exploring a first-principles approach to system design for various frontier problems. In this case it's AI that challenges the 'bigger is better' transformer paradigm. Lingo is the first piece of that research, a high-performance linguistic database designed to run on-device. The full technical overview and manifesto is here: https://medium.com/@robm.antunes/bcd1e9752af6 The paper has been archived on Zenodo with a DOI:…
Sep 2025
- 9
- 10
- 11MW
I've built mandoBot, a web app that segments and translates Mandarin Chinese text. This is a Django API (using Django-Ninja and PostgreSQL) and a NextJS front-end (with Typescript and Chakra). For a sample of what this app does, head to https://mandobot.netlify.app/?share_id=e8PZ8KFE5Y. This is my presentation of the first chapter of a classic story from the Republican era of Chinese fiction, Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun. Other chapters are located in the "Reading Room" section of the app. This app exists because reading Mandarin is very hard for learners (like me), since…
2025 · mandobot.netlify.app
- 12PL
Hey there HN - Today I'm sharing a demo of my our language learning tool, Phrasing. It's a tool born from the language acquisition hypothesis, too many hours in an anki slog, and a strange desire to always be learning obscure languages. The method is simple: 1. type in a show 2. learn the most important words 3. watch the show/acquire the words 4. review the words when needed in the future. On top of that, we're trying to: - do some novel things with spaced repetition (no more anki slog) - expand the sort of content you can learn from (I want to to refresh my French by reading The…
2024 · phrasing.app
- 13PI
Built with Nuxt & MongoDB – a way to preserve language with personal audio, anecdotes and stories. Hope to make a version open source one day so others can preserve their native languages.
2024 · nomenclature.ctang.art
- 14
- 15
- 16AN
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
- 17
- 18
AI-powered cross-platform dictionary and learning system.
Jan 2026
- 19WL
Hey everyone, I've been living in Germany for a while now and struggling to pick up German. Even though I finished a B1 level language course, remembering all the common German words has been tough. I've tried a bunch of apps, but couldn't stick to any of them. Last month, I had an idea. I thought, what if I could see a German word and its meaning on the Menu Bar of my Mac? That way, I could learn new words while working without needing to set aside dedicated time. The app uses a spaced-repetition algorithm, so you'll see the same word multiple times until you've got it down. And even after…
2024
- 20IB
Hey HN! I’m Alex, and one of my favorite ways to learn languages is by reading novels. Currently I’m reading 三体 (3 body problem), but one problem I've always had is it takes ages to look up words, and add them to Anki flashcards so I can remember them. 三体 is especially brutal with so much sci-fi vocab. That’s why I built Readly. I snap a pic of the page I’m reading, it loads the text in-app and lets me lookup words, add to Anki-style flashcards, or ask AI questions about the text, all in a single tap. It's a huge time saver. My specific learning strategy, if anyone wants to replicate it: 1.…
2025 · readly.ink
- 21
- 22TE
Hi When you are learning a new language, you need to practice different skills: reading, listening, speaking, writing. I find writing to be the hardest activity, not least because I have to look up words in the dictionary all the time, and that is a frustrating context switch. Here is an experimental CodeMirror-based editor, that lets you look up translations inline. Type @ followed by the English word, and get a list of possible translations, and select the translation to apply it. Online demo: https://foreign-dispatch-autocomplete.netlify.app/
2022 · github.com
- 23LA
2022 · linguistic-antipatterns.com
- 246W
2023 · 65words.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →