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barrell 3 days ago

Phrasing.app | Co-founder | EUROPE REMOTE

Phrasing is a bootstrapped company dedicated to building the most effective and efficient way to learn a language.

I’m a polyglot myself and have always struggled for a few main reasons:

1. Apps only ever focus on taking you from 0-1, never from 1-100.

2. If you have any experience in the language, it’s really hard to pick it up after a few years.

3. Language learning apps are always ugly, clunky, ugly, and just stressful to use. And ugly.

4. No apps support maintaining and learning multiple languages simultaneously

5. Apps only ever support the major languages, leaving minority languages in the dust

So, I set off to build my dream language learning application, and a quick 2 years and 10,000 hours later I’d built Phrasing.

It’s launched, it’s live, it has (happy) paying daily users, and I myself am using it to learn 18 languages. The product is ready to go, and the business is already growing organically.

I’m looking for someone cracked to come in in a co-founding capacity and eventually take over the backend (elixir) codebase from me.

No experience is required so long as you’re passionate, talented, and hungry.

If you’re interested, and located in Europe, send me an email at hn@phrasing.app.

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542458 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hunh. It feels weird to say "Language learning apps are always ugly, clunky" and "Apps only ever support the major languages, leaving minority languages in the dust" when those are a few things that Duolingo actually does fairly well. Don't get me wrong, Duolingo has a LOT of flaws and I'm excited to hear you're building an alternative to it, just the pitch feels like it's based on a time when Rosetta was the name to beat.

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barrell 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That’s a fair point. It was originally “Those that work are always…” but I lost that preface in some refactoring.

I think it’s quite obvious though why Duolingo doesnt disprove any of my points. There was and is still no pleasant, multilingual, effective language learning app on the market. For the most part, you can choose one of those (and no, I do not consider Duolingo “multilingual” in the sense most polyglots need :) )

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iammattmurphy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely. One thing you absolutely can’t say about Duolingo is that it’s ugly. Not very clunky either.

	▲	barrell 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I personally find it quite ugly and clunky. I feel like the interface is optimized for children, and the number of ads you have to tap through to get even a modicum of knowledge is quite clunky. The last time I used it I spent over 20 hours to partially learn almost 4 letters of the Arabic alphabet — I’d call that pretty clunky. Objectively they have a good team, but I do not think it’s above crticism in either regard.
	▲	andrepd 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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achllle 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Wish you had Flemish Dutch (Vlaams)

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barrell a day ago | parent [-]

Added! It will be under "Dutch (Belgium)" when displayed alphabetically, but it will appear as "Flemish" in reviews.

I'll work on getting some samples generated today or tomorrow for the onboarding flow, but if you sign up you can now extract expressions in Flemish.

	▲	sjamaan a day ago \| parent [-]
		Any chance you would add Dzongkha? PS: Cool product, if I were in a different life phase I would definitely consider joining you to build it!