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    Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language

    (menerdu.vercel.app)
    204 points lil_csom | 20 comments | 13 Jul 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom

    I'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!

    1. optionalsquid ◴[14 Jul 25 05:29 UTC] No.44556763[source]▶
    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".

    replies(2): >>44557186 #>>44571392 #
    2. lil_csom ◴[14 Jul 25 06:58 UTC] No.44557186[source]▶
    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!
    3. delusional ◴[15 Jul 25 14:14 UTC] No.44571392[source]▶
    > 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".

    It's a little better, but I would never expect anyone to translate "shopping" to "købe ind". "købe ind" is about getting groceries for the week, shopping is about walking the strip and dreaming of buying random clothing. As a native speaker I'd be less surprised if the you just used the borrowed word "shopping" directly. Basically "Jeg vil gerne shoppe i morgen".

    replies(2): >>44571854 #>>44571881 #
    4. shermantanktop ◴[15 Jul 25 15:01 UTC] No.44571854[source]▶
    If a European language gained a new everyday word in the last fifty years, there’s a solid chance that it’s a loan word from English. A little odd to learn a “foreign” language filled with that stuff.
    replies(5): >>44572269 #>>44572339 #>>44575250 #>>44575687 #>>44579971 #
    5. Blahah ◴[15 Jul 25 15:03 UTC] No.44571881[source]▶
    In British english at least, 'going shopping' is a normal way to say 'getting groceries for the week'.
    replies(2): >>44572278 #>>44575057 #
    6. dmoy ◴[15 Jul 25 15:36 UTC] No.44572269{3}[source]▶
    > European

    It's not restricted to European languages. 贝果 is bagel, just sounded out phonetically, and 三明治 is sandwich.

    Idk if there's anything super odd about it.

    Of course, English is the worst offender of loan words. As someone else said somewhere, "[English doesn't] just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

    Gung ho, monsoon, filibuster, herbivore, vacation, etc etc etc. Thousands upon thousands of loanwords.

    replies(1): >>44574721 #
    7. klipt ◴[15 Jul 25 15:37 UTC] No.44572278{3}[source]▶
    Yeah groceries is "shopping"

    "walking the strip and dreaming of buying random clothing" is "window shopping"

    replies(1): >>44573009 #
    8. piva00 ◴[15 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44572339{3}[source]▶
    With Scandinavian languages it went full circle, there are lots of everyday English words stemming from old Norse :)
    replies(3): >>44572530 #>>44573572 #>>44579970 #
    9. DataDaoDe ◴[15 Jul 25 15:59 UTC] No.44572530{4}[source]▶
    yes, a lot indeed. Even some very rare adoptions that almost never happen in languages (like the pronoun they). My most favorite has to be window though from the Old Norse vindauga (vind = wind, auga = eye).
    10. poly2it ◴[15 Jul 25 16:36 UTC] No.44573009{4}[source]▶
    In Swedish, shopping has been loaned to mean window shopping. Buying groceries is commonly called att handla.
    replies(1): >>44579733 #
    11. BurningFrog ◴[15 Jul 25 17:19 UTC] No.44573572{4}[source]▶
    As a Swede, I can recognize the norse root of most English word for things that existed 1000 years ago.
    12. dionian ◴[15 Jul 25 19:06 UTC] No.44574721{4}[source]▶
    Fun fact, 99% of words ending in -tion are the exact same in French. Every English speaker has a head start of hundreds of word vocabulary in French.
    replies(1): >>44576071 #
    13. SoftTalker ◴[15 Jul 25 19:42 UTC] No.44575057{3}[source]▶
    In US english (at least as I speak/understand it) "shopping" is any act of browsing/looking at/selecting something for purchase. It can be groceries, clothes, a car, anything really and it can be online or in person at a store.

    "I'm going shopping" with no other specifics would normally mean "for groceries" or other general household supplies, though.

    14. radicalbyte ◴[15 Jul 25 20:02 UTC] No.44575250{3}[source]▶
    You'll love Flanders.
    15. ge96 ◴[15 Jul 25 20:51 UTC] No.44575687{3}[source]▶
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM
    16. stragies ◴[15 Jul 25 21:38 UTC] No.44576071{5}[source]▶
    Those words also exist in Spanish, there the ending is "cion", and in Portuguese with ending "cão"
    replies(1): >>44576163 #
    17. ElevenLathe ◴[15 Jul 25 21:48 UTC] No.44576163{6}[source]▶
    And in Polish: -cja. Lots of languages have had a deep relationship with Latin, not just Romance languages.
    18. ragazzina ◴[16 Jul 25 07:47 UTC] No.44579733{5}[source]▶
    I think "go/do shopping" is the same in French, Spanish, Italian and German, as opposed to faire les courses / ir de compras / fare la spesa / einkaufen.
    19. liotier ◴[16 Jul 25 08:28 UTC] No.44579970{4}[source]▶
    Same in French. When my colleagues tell me about "le repository Git", I love to answer about "le repositoire git" - sounds mightily quaint but that French word is actually the one through which the Latin repositorium percolated to English.
    20. palata ◴[16 Jul 25 08:28 UTC] No.44579971{3}[source]▶
    On the other hand, English is a Germanic language and got influenced by French. A nice recent article talked about why English doesn't use accents (because... of French) [1].

    Just to say it's not uncommon at all to have languages influence each other.

    [1]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-english-doesnt-use...