Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language
menerdu.vercel.appI'm in my 4th year living in Denmark as an expat, and I finally decided it’s time to properly learn Danish. I do have a Danish girlfriend, after all. One way I’ve been practicing is by trying to text only in Danish, but I often find myself stuck. I start my message in Danish, then hit a wall because I don’t know a word or how to fit something naturally into the sentence.
Especially in those cases, I used to give up and translate the entire message from English, which kind of defeats the purpose and interrupts the learning process.
So I started prompting GPT. I’d write my message with wildcards or notes for the parts I didn’t know, and it would return a corrected version. That worked well, but reusing the prompt each time became tedious.
So I built a wrapper around it.
Now I can type in the target language, mark unclear parts with curly braces {like this}, and get an instant corrected version with explanations. I also added a history feature so I can review what I got wrong, and I plan to build more on that soon (eg. summary of areas or words to review).
This app is for language learners who want to practice writing without feeling insecure about mistakes or breaking their flow by switching to a translator.
I hope you find it useful!
This is an interesting idea.
But, besides not being able to use your site due to the errors mentioned by other posters, both the examples on your website give me pause:
The example input "Kan you hjelmpe mig {yesterday}?" reads to me as "Can you help me yesterday?", but that's just a nonsense sentence and an odd choice for an example. The word for "help" is also misspelled, but presumably that would get corrected.
And the suggestion of "Jeg vil gerne handle i morgen" for "Jeg vil gerne go shopping i morgen", instead reads to me as "I would like to act tomorrow". A more idiomatic translation would be "Jeg vil gerne købe ind i morgen".
Hey, thank you for your input! I definitely have to improve the example texts and make sure that the way the tool should be used is better understood!
Really good idea.
I also really like the name.
Maybe add a language selector such that the AI has a better context of what language the user is interested in.
Thank you! Yes, I think that would be the best really, so the AI has an easier time.
It seems that my GPT credits have been deplated, thus the error :) Sorry about that! I decided that if I do ran out, I will continue the development - showing that is has popularity!
In the meantime, I am at work, so I don't think I can add the rate limiting now... but thank you for everyone for the input!
i tried a simple "donde (bus station)?" but i got an error about an invalid text
This is really cool!
I've done a lot of research into LLM translation for my product[0], and I'm currently working on a deep translation service that provides reliably human-level translations.
I don't know what model you're using, but GPT-4.1 is probably the best for your use case - it's in the top few % for nearly every language, and has a low standard deviation, while also being relatively low latency and low cost.
[0] https://nuenki.app
Thank you so much for the suggestion! I'll later also check out your app!
Tried it with some Dutch, only getting "Unable to process correction" errors. Good idea but seems it need a bit more error handling.
Hey yeah, I have ran out of API credits due to popular demand! Sorry that you couldn't try it this time :(
Well I broke it immediately, haha. Sorry about that. Apparently it doesn't like Chinese.
In the example text hjelmpe is not a word in Danish.
Haha, nope, that's just a genuine typo! :D Good catch!
I assume the stuff about the AI giving corrections might apply to more than just what's in curly braces, i.e. that this might be intentional, but I'm unable to test due to a "Unable to process correction" error on the demo.
Also, yes the TTS doesn't work yet - I decided to share the MVP first before adding my Google billing account :P
I got an error. Is it working now?
For this MVP, I decided I will not add it yet - I just wanted to grasp how interesting people would think it is :) I will however soon add it, joined with rate limiting!
First of all, 10 points for the dedication and perseverance! The website looks super professional and promising. What other languages can it help with? I am planning to learn Arabic. Also, are there options to choose between different dialects of a language?
Hey! It should work with all the languages as it auto-detect the target and the source language - however, it might need to be tuned the bit. Eg. if you write in arabic but use English wildcards, it should work okay! About the dialects actually I haven't thought of! I think you can provide it as context, however it's probably limited to what GPT knows as I don't integrate with any official trasnlators as of now :) Interesting use-case!