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A proof-of-concept language learning app that uses LLMs to generate definitions of unknown words using only previously mastered vocabulary.

Enjoyers of this concept would probably like this wonderful talk about programming language design by Guy Steele (Sun, Java Language): Growing a Language

https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0

6 hours agoby NiloCK

Interesting concept! Think this would be quite cool to explore. Personally am very interested in language learning concepts / apps.

My first concerns though:

1. How can the system know which words I already know.

2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.

3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.

12 hours agoby bryanhogan

Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?

11 hours agoby dylanzhangdev

It is so inspiring. Recently, I've been thinking of making a side project using LLMs for learning new languages too. Transformers were originally designed for machine translation and now we have much better ones. My idea is to write a mobile app which I have zero experience.

7 hours agoby sbinnee

This is a really smart idea.

I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.

3 days agoby jtokoph

How hard would it be to add new languages ?

3 hours agoby mog_dev

This is extremely interesting, great idea. Really both thumbs up. Looking for more ideas/lifehack approaches to learning via LLMs.

11 hours agoby nubg

Cool idea! You mentioned the model struggling with Chinese a bit. Have you tried any Chinese models, e.g. DeepSeek or GLM? I imagine they probably have a lot more Chinese in the pretraining. (And their English is certainly fine too!)

12 hours agoby andai

This is genius! I love it.

10 hours agoby closetkantian