Dear Duolingo, I'm fed up of spending weeks learning how to order "un caffè con latte". LangLime takes a self-guided approach to learning, helping you with your reading and writing by translating realistic snippets (with a few other bells and whistles).
Patio
Looking great, I like the feedback loop! Is it just text-based right now, or can you learn by speaking too?
LangLime
@julien_rioux Thanks! At the moment the input is just text-based, but you can use text-to-speech to listen. Having a microphone input is definitely on the roadmap, stay tuned
Fantastic.
How many languages does it support? Arabic and Spanish included? Any chance you'd include Bengali any time soon so I can share this with my friends?
LangLime
@mukto90 Hey, currently it supports six: Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German, Korean. Arabic and Bengali could be interesting, however, I'd need feedback from native speakers of those languages to ensure that it functions are expect. If you know anyone that could help then let me know :)
LangLime
Good morning people. I'm not entirely sure what I’m “supposed” to write here, so let me just tell you why I built LangLime.
About a year ago, I met a girl. I know, I know…. that’s one hell of an accomplishment for a tech guy. She’s Italian, I’m English - so I started learning her language.
Like everyone, I downloaded Duolingo plus a stack of flashcard apps. But honestly… they’re bad. Like. Really bad. I spent a few months grinding pointless “achievements” and I got absolutely nowhere.
So, being a developer, I did the only rational thing: I dropped my other projects and built the tool I actually needed. At first it was just for me, then friends tried it, and now here we are.
Anyway, that’s the origin story of LangLime out of the way. Now it’s time to try and convince you to why it’s better than the hoard of other language-learning apps.
🔥 What We’re Solving
I think we can all admit that the best way to learn a language is through real conversations with natives. But that’s scary, and often inaccessible when you’re starting out. So people turn to apps.
The problem? They’re slow. They spoon-feed you vocabulary like you’ve got the IQ of a meerkat. Hours of fill-in-the-blank (I’m looking at you, Duolingo), endless flashcards, or chatting with an AI avatar who misunderstands everything you say.
This has got to stop. You need to learn a language like how a child learns a language. You need exposure.
🧯 How we solve it
Now, LangLime isn’t offering you the entire new-born baby experience, and I’m not going to send over a loving couple to roll play mummy and daddy and coax you into saying your first word. But, what I can give you is a way of practising reading and writing using realistic, customisable excerpts. Not just telling you how to ask "where is the library?".
I’m simplifying things massively here, and there’s a bunch of other features like sentence-level grammar breakdowns, text-to-speech, support for multiple languages, blah blah blah (you get the gist).
If you want to see all of LangLime's capabilities without going through the paywall just head to the /tutorials page.
LangLime
P.S. My Twitter DMs are open so feel free to ask me anything… well at least, almost anything.
Does this just jump straight into phrasing, or can we work on grammar, conjugation, etc explicitly?
LangLime
@j_k_childs It goes straight into sentences. You can change the “configuration” so each of the texts that you translate focus on specific grammatical features (e.g conjugations).
@samwelzimmer Very nice—thanks for pointing that out!
Looks great! I have been using Duolingo - since the gamification keeps it interesting and gives me a wide range of languages to learn.
But 'Visualize your learning' and 'Instant Feedback' look promising. Any plans to include Asian languages like Viatnamese and Japanese?
LangLime
@ishani_singh1 Hey, I’m glad to hear that you’re interested. Yes, we certainly do plan on adding more Asian languages - maybe not Vietnamese any time soon, but Japanese and Mandarin (we already have Korean).
Lmk if you have any other questions xx
Great app so far! I have been using Duolingo for a long time with 880 days streak but have not progressed at all. I have found Langlime to be much more effective and fun to use! Good luck!
LangLime
@alexei_bondarenco Thank you! You’re feedback during the development process has been super helpful.
Congrats on the launch! For beginners, how does it scaffold immersion without overwhelming, e.g., via simplified dialogues or progressive difficulty?