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by bryanhogan 180 days ago
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 comments

Thanks for the questions. Very fair concerns. Take all of this with a fairly large pinch of salt; this is still an experiment.

1. How does it know which words I already know? It doesn’t automatically. You provide that set. For example, if you’ve completed HSK 1, you can paste the HSK 1 word list into LangSeed and mark those as "known". From there, new explanations are constrained to that vocabulary. You can also paste in real text and mark the easy words as known, though that’s a bit more manual.

2. How much might I misunderstand word meanings? Depends on how advanced the vocab is and how large your known-word set is. I think of this as building intuition rather than giving dictionary-precise definitions. As you see words in more contexts, that intuition sharpens. This is just my experience from testing it over the last couple of weeks.

3. How inaccurate are the explanations? I tested it on Swedish (my native language). There are occasional awkward or slightly odd phrasings, but it’s rarely outright wrong.