iafineden

Making software I love to use.

— read the web in the language you're learning. 8 languages, free.

[iafineden @iafineden]

Mossglen 2.0 is out.

Tap a word on any page or YouTube video. After that it lights up on every site you read, and comes back for review right there.

Stuck on a sentence? Ask Pip. It knows your level.

8 languages. Free on Chrome & Edge.

link below

[iafineden @iafineden]

@JeffKayama 耳が痛いです。英語の記事は読めるのに、声に出すと簡単な文で口が止まる。読むのと言うのは別の筋肉なんだと最近やっと認めました。

[iafineden @iafineden]

@wani_kawaiinono 私のスペイン語で一番スラスラ言えるのは「スペイン語は少ししか話せません」です。たぶん一番練習した文。

[iafineden @iafineden]

@Natsuki_CHTH 中国語ネイティブから一つだけ。声調は口より先に耳だと思います。mā と mà を聞き分けられれば、発音は後からでも直せます。聞き分けられないまま進むと、自分の間違いに気づけないので。

[iafineden @iafineden]

@petergyang @meetgranola Same pang here. For my language tool I picked an MCP over building a mobile app, which means the screens I spent the most time on become optional. Still the right call. People want the word explained wherever they already are.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@danshipper @ChatGPT I gave the agent in my language app a face for a similar reason: it's a jackdaw. People learning a language have a lot of small dumb questions, and asking a bird feels easier than typing into a box.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@BHolmesDev Having it ask me questions is the change that stuck for me. Most bad changes in my language app came from a wrong guess about what I wanted, and the code itself looked fine. One question before it starts saves a whole review.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@emollick The audit agent is the part I'd want first. Building my language app, an agent checking its own work is always happy with it. A second one that only sees the output, never the plan, is far more honest.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@dabit3 Felt this on my language app. I used to think of myself as a designer. Now half my day is reviewing what agents built, and the design part is deciding what gets cut before they start.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@YGogakuin 中国語のネットでも「有毒（毒がある）」が「クセになる」の意味で使われます。这首歌有毒＝この曲が頭から離れない。麻薬も毒も褒め言葉になるの、面白いですね。

[iafineden @iafineden]

@KTogemaru 4201日すごいです。The Economistって今でも毎回知らない単語に出会いますか？私は英語の記事を読んでいて、知らない単語が数個くらいの記事が一番続きます。

[iafineden @iafineden]

@jdcarX Same reason I read English novels in English now. I grew up on Chinese translations, and the first original I finished felt like meeting the author instead of the interpreter. Hope War and Peace in Russian is the reward at the end.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@rauchg Same on the product side. In a reading tool, if a sentence explanation takes three seconds, people stop tapping and just guess. As models get faster, the steps around them are what users actually feel.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@murtuza_merc Saw a small version of this with my reading app. It looked great on the news sites I tested with, then users brought pages I had never tried and the misses started. The pages I didn't pick taught me more than any score.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@craigweiss The part nobody warned me about: reviewing 20 agents is mostly reading, and reading carefully is slower than writing. Building my language app this way, the bottleneck is my attention, not their output.

[iafineden @iafineden]

Tem palavras em espanhol que eu leio há meses e nunca ouvi ninguém falar. Na minha cabeça cada uma tinha uma voz inventada. Outro dia uma delas apareceu num podcast e soava totalmente diferente. Foi como conhecer pessoalmente alguém com quem eu só trocava cartas.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@Milkiiera Biased answer since I build one: Mossglen, a browser extension. You read real French sites or YouTube, tap any word you don't know, and it brings those words back for review later. Pairs well with a speaking app since it's mostly about reading.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@kush_147 @duolingo 1000 days is a lot of tiny decisions not to skip. Curious what it looks like now. Is it still mostly the lessons, or are you watching and reading real Spanish stuff too?

[iafineden @iafineden]

@Loi_cee Same thing happens to me in Spanish. A phrase like sin embargo just comes out mid-sentence and I have no memory of ever studying it. Pretty sure it came from seeing it in a few hundred articles.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@gabiciddeleon Como hablante nativo de chino, un aviso: el chino jurídico es casi otro idioma. Las noticias las leo sin esfuerzo, pero un contrato lo tengo que leer dos veces. Para un abogado es otro nivel de estudio.

[iafineden @iafineden]

@Dictionarycom Chinese has a cousin of this word: 炼丹, refining the elixir, which is what Daoist alchemists did. Online it now means tuning AI models by trial and error, which feels very Paracelsus.