Show HN: Learning a Language Using Only Words You Know
4 comments
·December 15, 2025andai
Cool idea! You mentioned the model struggling with Chinese a bit. Have you tried any Chinese models, e.g. DeepSeek or GLM? I imagine they probably have a lot more Chinese in the pretraining. (And their English is certainly fine too!)
bryanhogan
Interesting concept! Think this would be quite cool to explore. Personally am very interested in language learning concepts / apps.
My first concerns though:
1. How can the system know which words I already know.
2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.
3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.
jtokoph
This is a really smart idea.
I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.
simedw
Thanks! I think getting comfortable with characters fairly early is important, as it helps shift your mindset into the right place. That said, I don’t think this project really works until you’re comfortable with at least ~60 characters.
A proof-of-concept language learning app that uses LLMs to generate definitions of unknown words using only previously mastered vocabulary.