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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 | 1 comments | 13 Jul 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 1.35s | source

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. zersiax ◴[15 Jul 25 14:40 UTC] No.44571631[source]▶
This is a really cool concept :) Generally in language learning it's a good idea to try to "think" in the language as much as you can so you get creative about how to phrase something with the words you do have, but if that fails, particularly when you're just starting out this is a great motivational aid and conversation starter if nothing else :) I would definitely recommend integrating with an established translator like DeepL as well as a kind of second correction as AI does get things wrong and having the two versions can help compare what may have gone wrong, you can probably keep your autodetecting language bit as well as I am pretty sure DeepL supports language identification and if not, I know Google does. Good luck with learning Danish, I tried my hand at it a few years back but have switched to Finnish as of early this year