[ESMP]

I would use it for japanese, but after seeing these two examples of english/japanese translations in the landing page that are nonsense just make me say: no thanks.

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. しかし息子が木から落ちたり、娘が妊娠させられたりしたときには、そうした結末に対処せざるを得ない。 規律

Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; 子供たちが「自分はこの人たちとは違う。 自分はこの世界に向いていない」と思ったとしても彼らを責められまい。

[AdamH12113]

To be clear, some of the example translations given for Japanese seem to be for the wrong parts of the documents.

Phrasing English: I am not suited to this world.

Phrasing Japanese: それなのに大人たちは、自分たちのやっている事が好きだと言い張る。

Actual meaning: Despite this, adults insist that they like what they do.

Phrasing English: It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do.

Phrasing Japanese: 数十億人のうち、おそらく二、三十万人といったところだろう。 好きな仕事を見つけるのは難しい。

Actual meaning: Probably 2-300,000 out of billions of people. It's hard to find a job you like.

[numpad0]

I think:

  - this is supposed to be collection of parallel texts, in this example [1] in various languages, and,  
  - the principle is looking at parallel texts should help your brain make mappings between the two,   
    * eg. "daidai iro no webusaito" <-> "a website in orange". 

1: https://paulgraham.com/love.html

[barrell]

Honestly, I would not recommend it for Japanese/Chinese atm. We're aware the quality there is really not good. We'll have to spend a couple months dedicated to these languages specifically to clean them up.

Still, we don't want to stop our users from learning any language with it, even if it's not well supported. But I've been very transparent with any of our beta testers that Chinese/Japanese are not going to be a great experience (yet!)

[pech0rin]

I'm also an advanced Japanese learner and find this disappointing. It would be great if your marketing materials said which languages you support and which you don't. It says "learn any language", but I see a lot of comments in here about oh it doesn't work well with this or that language. It makes sense to focus yourself on the languages that you actually do support. Over promise and under deliver is not the way to build trust or a good product.

[barrell]

To clarify, there’s nothing stopping you from learning Japanese with it. Almost all of our beta testers are polyglots, studying 5+ languages, most of them studying at least Japanese or Chinese. It’s just that the alignments don’t work well with Hanzi/Kanji - the app itself still function fine, just with a bit more manual effort

We’ve made sure to be transparent with any of our beta testers about the limitations. We also agree that more docs would be better, and they will be coming. We been discussing internally a way to grade languages… but any conversation we’ve had in that area ends up in the same place: we need users to help us grade the languages.

We very specifically do not want to focus in on just a couple languages. There are hundreds of tools out there dedicated to individual languages, and we don’t feel we have anything unique to contribute there.

Sorry if it came across disingenuous! That was not our intention. As we work with beta testers, and learned of all these languages, we will develop more documentation around the precise limits :)

[gwd]

It sounds like you've gone massively for breadth, at the expense of any depth. "We need users to help us grade the languages" sounds like you're asking people to pay you for the privilege of working for you. Why would I pay $10/mo, much less $100/mo, if I have to figure out for myself what content is good and bad?

What I want as a learner is for someone else to give me good, accurate content; I definitely want to avoid any content in the target language which isn't native-sounding, because who knows how long it will take those bad habits to break.

One idea I had for content was something like this:

1. Start with two languages; say, English and Chinese (the first of which I'm a native speaker, the second of which I'm learning); and focus on English speakers who want to learn Chinese, and Chinese speakers who want to learn English.

2. Start with some basic content in both languages; from Tatoeba, from wikipedia, whatever. And hire a few native speakers of both languages to review, validate, and rate content.

3. Give new users some amount of credit for free; enough for them to use it for a few months.

4. Once they're out of credit, they have two choices: They can either pay a flat monthly fee, or they can contribute back to the content: Writing new content, reviewing & validating content, rating content, etc. And people could do whatever mix they want.

5. Expand to other languages as you grow.

I definitely see the attraction of trying to use automation to expand as far and wide as possible, but I think that ultimately it's more important to start by doing a few things well than by doing 50 things poorly.

[icosa]

I want to know how well supported each language is. Rate support as Alpha, Beta, Full so I can decide if I want to use your app.