Looking for a co-founder to change language learning forever
I&#x27;ve studied a few languages and have long wished for &#x2F; thought of making software roughly along the lines of what you&#x27;re suggesting here. While tackling a text, looking up words one-at-a-time can be painfully inefficient and break the flow. Digital dictionaries are quicker than paper ones, but don&#x27;t resolve the fundamental problem. Nothing as advanced as natural language processing crossed my mind, but I did imagine software that would take a target text and generate a vocabulary list that the user could then study efficiently, allowing the user to then read the text fluidly without need for looking up words. There is a long tradition of human-produced &quot;readers&quot; that do this, but software would allow generating this for any text the user wanted and with much greater flexibility and learning options (e.g. auto-generated Anki flashcard decks).<p>I looked into LingQ (mentioned in another comment here), which promises just this idea, but found that it failed pretty badly in execution, to the point that a paper dictionary and notebook just worked better.<p>I know you&#x27;re seeking a cofounder, but here are some suggestions I hope you find useful:<p>- I think it&#x27;s essential to use a top-quality dictionary for something like this. I&#x27;ve found Oxford to produce excellent bilingual dictionaries in the languages I&#x27;ve studied. Of course these are copyright-protected and so would require paid purchases or licensing of some kind to use. I think there&#x27;s a tendency to use generic free-license dictionaries for software like this, and these really aren&#x27;t good enough.<p>- There&#x27;s also a tendency to bake into the software the false assumption that &quot;a word is a word&quot;, when of course words can have many different meanings, words in different languages do not have one-to-one correspondence, and for most languages, learning a word requires also learning extra information such as gender, conjugation, declension, pronunciation&#x2F;stress, etc. This goes hand-in-hand with using a top-quality dictionary, which lists multiple word meanings, phrases, and extra linguistic information that poorer-quality dictionaries omit or get wrong.<p>- I would suggest incorporating human-produced translations in the user&#x27;s native language of the texts in the user&#x27;s target language, at least as an option that the user could upload. Even the best machine translation software can miss quite a lot.