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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.

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?

1 month agoby dylanzhangdev

This is quite a great idea, as a native Chinese speaker, i want to say this is the way very similar how we learned Chinese when we were kids.

On the other hand, the Chinese writing system is logographic (or ideographic), unlike the English system which is phonetic. The most basic characters, such as 日 (sun), 月 (moon), and 山 (mountain), are essentially graphics (or pictures) of the objects themselves. that makes them very suitable for being represented by images. The emoji you are using is also very good.

I believe this method should be very effective for beginners in Chinese. However, once you have mastered the basic Chinese characters, you can learn about the structure of Chinese characters and then continue reading more materials to expand your vocabulary.

The real challenge is to expand your vocabulary through extensive reading, i'm actually working on a tool to solve this specific problem (https://lingoku.ai/learn-chinese), If you are reading English, it will insert Chinese text for you, if your are reading Chinese text, it will translate the text from Chinese to English then inject Chinese words into the translated text, thus improving your vocabulary while reading.

1 month agoby englishcat

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.

1 month agoby jtokoph

1 month agoby johanyc

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

1 month agoby nubg

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.

1 month agoby bryanhogan

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.

1 month agoby sbinnee

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

1 month agoby NiloCK

As a fellow Mandarin learner - this is super cool! Intuitively makes a lot of sense for the "full immersion" component of language. I love to see exciting uses of AI for language learning like this instead of just more slop generation :)

I haven't dug into the github repo but I'm curious if by "guided decoding" you're referring to logit bias (which I use), or actual token blocking? Interested to know how this works technically.

(shameless self plug) I've actually been solving a similar problem for Mandarin learning - but from the comprehensible input side rather than the dictionary side:

https://koucai.chat - basically AI Mandarin penpals that write at your level

My approach uses logit bias to generate n+1 comprehensible input (essentially artificially raising the probability of the tokens that correspond to the user's vocabulary). Notably I didn't add the concept of a "regeneration loop" (otherwise there would be no +1 in N+1) but think it's a good idea.

Really curious about the grammar issues you mentioned - I also experimented with the idea of an AI-enhanced dictionary (given that the free chinese-english dictionary I have is lacking good examples) but determined that the generated output didn't meet my quality standards. Have you found any models that handle measure words reliably?

1 month agoby bisonbear

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!)

1 month agoby andai

This site sucks on mobile. can't upload full text files? why no prepared texts to start reading right away?

1 month agoby gamander

How hard would it be to add new languages ?

1 month agoby mog_dev

This is genius! I love it.

1 month agoby closetkantian