Show HN: ReadPlusOne – Spanish stories built around the words you're learning

Show HN: ReadPlusOne – Spanish stories built around the words you're learning(readplusone.com)

5 points by brandonc7 38 days ago | 7 comments

Hey HN,

Over the past 6 months, I've been working on a Spanish language learning app that generates stories for you with your target words. For the last 2, I've been reading with it most mornings and it's really helped me grow my vocab.

It generates short stories built around your target words you are learning, and uses vocabulary you already know for the majority of the story (around 95%). As you read along you click any word you don't know and it puts them into a spaced repetition system (SRS) to appear in future generated stories.

It does need an account to work. I have a short on-boarding quiz to estimate your level, after that you are able to generate and read stories.

I built it because I was having issues finding graded readers that were at my exact level, a B1 graded book can vary greatly on vocabulary used. I also wanted a system to help me learn words that I kept forgetting. I tried Anki for that, but the flashcard system just wasn't for me, but this system has been working much better.

For this project I used natural language processing to handle all the recorded words of the user. Nouns and adjectives collapse to their lemma (root of the word), so libro and libros are one record. But with verbs we don't, so each tense and mood is tracked on its own. The SRS picks whichever of these are due, and to simplify it, they are passed into the prompt. Then a separate validator measures the draft's vocabulary against your recorded vocabulary of the user, and if too much falls outside it, the draft is rejected and it tries again.

It's Spanish only right now, and it works best from around A2 up, once you get below that level it becomes hard to generate interesting stories to engage the reader. I plan to add other languages in the future, once I feel that the Spanish system feels fully complete.

Happy to answer any questions about the project!

darraghmckay 38 days ago |

This is great, I just went through the first lesson. As someone trying to learn Spanish I have been putting off getting Claude to write a short story for me daily, but this is better with the repeated repetition and built in translate/clues.

I wish you could highlight multiple words to translate them though, because sometimes it's not just one word that gives the meaning, but the combination.

brandonc7 38 days ago | |

Thank you, I’m glad you like it. I actually was never planning to add translation support but I added some after user feedback. But I’ll add multi-word translation onto my roadmap.

darraghmckay 38 days ago | | |

That would be great! Also being able to add short multi-word phrases to the repetition

LuminousWzrd 38 days ago |

Might be nice to make the quiz easier to find on the main page. It took me some scrolling and looking before I saw it, and, and maybe make it accessible without creating a user account. I'd definitely do the free quiz, but seeing a sign in screen so early on is kind of off putting.

brandonc7 38 days ago | |

That makes sense, I do need to calibrate and store recorded words for the user in the database after that. Do you think a user would be more off put after taking the time to do a quiz, to then realize they need to create an account?

idbnstra 38 days ago |

are you considering adding more languages soon? i’d love this for french!

brandonc7 38 days ago | |

Spanish is the current focus, I want to add more grammar features, so stories help target the readers grammar weak points. But after that I am planning to expand to other languages and most likely other Latin based languages as it will be the easiest to expand support to.