Language Learning App (Part 3)

Sure.

The problem with a language learner is that we can't just translate text and tell the user to say it or something like that. We have to teach the user about the rules of the language and how to write as well. And that's where it gets hard to program because each language has its specific needs to be in this. I think the only way to solve this problem is to have actual people who know a language, program these rules into the app. There's no other way that I can think of. Does anyone else have an easier or more practical solution to this?

If you didn't understand what I meant, here is an example: Some languages have feminine and masculine words. For example in French, "la" is used to refer to feminine things whereas "le" is for masculine things. A user learning French from English would not know this, as there is no such thing in English.

"le chat" is masculine, "le oncle" is masculine. (those are the only nonvulgar nouns I know the gender and spelling of in French.) That doesn't mean all cats are male, just that the French word for "cat" is masculine gender, but most (I say "most" to not offend transgender people and people who are uncles but not male) uncles are male.

Also:

(that's talking about the Spanish word for whatever goes here ^)

Edit: My point is that gender rules in languages that have it tend to be arbitrary. But not necessarily so with noun classes.

Yes, Japanese is a fine example of this. (e.g. pronouns (私 = I (feminine), 僕 = I (masculine), topic particles (僕の = my or mine, 僕 = I(as の is possessive))

BTW

I never knew that. I'll just stick to 私.

"0" gets translated to Japanese as "0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" for some reason.

I'm sorry. No offence intended here but I don't get the point of what you're trying to say here.

Or, reworded, languages that have gender rules (French and Spanish are examples) tend to have gender rules that don't usually make sense. For example, what gender is the word "list"? Languages that have gender have to be able to answer that, even if the answer given makes no sense.

Yes, it's true, some words are based on nothing except what sounds good and what doesn't. But some things can tell you whether the word is male or female. For example, "né" is masculine as there is no "e" after the last letter. However "née" is clearly feminine. The same thing applies to most other words. They have a masculine and a feminine version of themselves and they usually have an "e" or no "e" to tell which gender it is.

Just as "bon" is masculine, and "bonne" feminine. But that's an adjective. Adjectives typically agree with their head nouns in whatever [I don't know exactly what word goes here]. But noun genders are typically arbitrary. Sounds also contribute to this; the German word for "girl" is neuter gender not because of anything "neuter" about girls, but because the word ends with "chen".

Agreed. But back to this case

we still need specific code for each language to explain to the user how the rules work.

This will be over the storage limit….

We could do courses like “Greetings” “Places” “Verbs” etc.

I wonder if we could add Catalan. After all, @jguille2 and some others speak Catalan. Plus, just look at #local-communities:catalan-community.

Yes exactly.

I don't think libretranslate.de supports it.

Yeah, it doesn't. I checked, like, 8 minutes ago.

So, instead of a learning language app, why not a translator app? Because teaching a language is very hard without doing specific code for each language.

Translator then. We need a whole new UI… h o r a y

We should probably make the translator first, then the UI.