Show HN: Learner, a German flashcard app

by BillFranklin • 11 years ago

23 21 11 years ago

Red_Tarsius2• 11 years ago

I like it. You could let the user create their own set of cards. Unlike Anki your service is web-based and users would easily share their sets on fb, twitter... sort of "SlideShare meets Anki".

EDIT: I didn't know there's already cram.com.

BillFranklin6• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

This is more just to scratch an itch, I couldn't find something simple which would help me learn the 1000 most used German words that didn't require me to create an account.

hammerandtongs• 11 years ago

https://ankiweb.net/

Lots of shared/syncable content up for anki actually.

The biggest problem has more to do with the differences of what people are studying from one say german or math class to another.

Red_Tarsius2• 11 years ago

whoops, I had no clue about the web counterpart.

smcl• 11 years ago

I've got something similar in-progress for the grammatical weirdness of Czech @ http://conjugate.cz.

I figured Memrise already has the "memorise the meaning" part sewn up, but doesn't seem to work well with anything more complex.

italophil• 11 years ago

I like the idea. You should look over the capitalization of nouns. The first word term I saw was "Hallo welt!" it should be spelled "Hallo Welt!".

mcbetz2• 11 years ago

German native speaker here. I don't know where you got these words from, but they surely are not the 1000 most used German ones. Within the first 10 rounds, I got "Mitte Kritik" which is nonsense, "uns Stadt" which is grammatically wrong (should be "unsere Stadt"/"our city") and some where the noun must be uppercase ("Hallo welt!" must be "Hallo Welt!" for example).

The University of Leipzig has a more reliable list of common words, which you might use with Google Sheets (GoogleTranslate(REF, "de", "en")).

http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top1000de.txt

BillFranklin6• 11 years ago

Thank you! This is really useful. Finding a reliable source of words and their translations (that I could turn into a json) was the hardest part of building this.

mcbetz2• 11 years ago

They also have a longer list with 10.000 words. http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top10000de.txt

Google gives you 80% right translations, a more reliable dictionary is PONS (http://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung). It also has an API, but you can only shoot 1000 free queries a month.

Another good dictionary is dict.leo.org, but unfortunately there is no API.

A last good option is dict.cc; you can download their corpus and use it programmatically with tools like this: https://github.com/cofi/PDictCC

rambambam• 11 years ago

I have been thinking of building some flashcard-like app for these English words I come across all the time, but never remember (to give you an idea: "exuberance" for example). Any integration with Google Translate would be cool, because the moment I look up some word, it should be added as a flashcard, together with the translation. Every time I look up a new word, I should be tested for a few old words, to see if I still remember them.

BillFranklin6• 11 years ago

Using the Google Translate app is great as it saves the things you translate. You could also check out http://www.cram.com/ or Memrise as I think they have account features. This is purely a 'show me the top 1k german words' app, I might make it the top 10000 if my German improves and build in other lists for phrases, numbers and other groups.

gabchan2• 11 years ago

This strangely reminds me of rapscript.de

Just add music ;)

BillFranklin6• 11 years ago

Haha, the music is great! http://rapscript.de/words.html

But they don't show you the translations :(

melling• 11 years ago

I've got a free iOS app for learning German: http://bit.ly/1dpZctq

In addition to word lists, there are over 1000 pictures and several games.

wongarsu• 11 years ago

Something that isn't handled well yet are cases where words have multiple meanings. For example you translate "endlich" with "at last", which is correct, but endlich also means "finite" (depending on context). Ideally, you should indicate that both are possible translations.

gabchan2• 11 years ago

Add "suggest better translation" feature please

BillFranklin6• 11 years ago

If anyone would like to help build this or make your own the code is here under MIT license

https://github.com/bilbof/Deutsch-app

Tomte• 11 years ago

Single words aren't too useful, because there are many ambiguities. You'd better use simple sentences.

Another thing: Be very careful about capitalization.

I just got "Sie means they". Yes. In a way.

But the "sie" that you mean is written with a lower-case "s" (unless at the beginning of a sentence, of course).

So my immediate reaction was: this must be the form of address "Sie".

Of course, had you shown "sie", the first thought would have gone towards "sie" as in "she"…

Just use sentences that resolve those ambiguities.

Show HN: Learner, a German flashcard app

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