Show HN: All Books, All Languages – Read short stories and books in any language

4 points by Falimonda 3 months ago | 4 comments
I've been working on a modern, web-based, parallel text language-learning application that I've come to call "All Books, All Languages", or ABAL for short.

It currently supports 56 languages (including Klingon and Latin!) - which comes out to 3080 permutations - or 3080 unique user profiles as I like to think of it. Both the marketing and application sites are fully internationalized - even response messages in 4xx responses use i18n. A lot of the work went into automating the i18n diff generation system to make sure I can release UI/UX changes quickly.

The name All Books, All Languages is intentionally quixotic as it serves to set the amibtious and unreachable goal of hosting all of humanity's written works while making them available to all language learners and readers across the globe!

Today, it hosts a number of generated short stories categorized by subject matter and CEFR level. I'm currently working on supporting (private) self-uploaded files, and works in the public domain. Work is also going into adding support for more languages while evaluating and optimizing for cross-language translations accuracy.

I've already recevied a lot of great feedback about the application among language learners. In addition to what I hope is an intuitive UI/UX, one of the unique things about ABAL is the way that pronunciations are customized to a user's native and target languages.

Systems like IPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...) don't make pronunciation any easy to get right for a majority of - if not all - language learners. ABAL gets around this by showing phonetic hints that are written in the user's native language script and are meant to be pronounced in the native language's voice.

Why did I build this? I was always a fan of printed parallel text books when I was younger. They allowed me to absorb new vocabulary and internalize grammar much faster than from flash-card/quiz-based systems after a certain point in my language learning journey. The existing parallel text applications provide sparse coverage across the languages and books they claim to support. ABAL's mission is to fix that by making all books available in all languages to all people.

I hope you'll find it useful if you're learning a new language or need to practice one you already know. If you're not learning a new language, but wish you could read classics in a language you're fluent in, stay tuned!

Links: Marketing site: https://www.abal.ai Application site: https://read.abal.ai X for updates: @abal_ai

  • lawls 3 months ago
    This is the Latin dream application I had been wanting to create for a decade. From the bottom of my heart, I congratulate you on the new Alexandrian Library.
    • Falimonda 3 months ago
      I'm glad to hear that! Do let me know if you have any feedback on it.
    • mreichhoff 3 months ago
      cool! how did you determine the CEFR levels of the stories?

      Minor, but I also see a few placeholders like "Why {{appName}}?"

      • Falimonda 3 months ago
        I generated category levels and subcategories first. These are associated to a CEFR level and all that bundled into the story generator.

        While it's currently decent for the purpose of language learning, I do need to fix consistency across longer stories because a purely sequential generation suffers from consistency in plot details.

        The idea was always to offer real books in the public domian, but I decided to release it with generated stories so I could begin gather feedback on UI/UX.

        Thanks for calling that out! I'll look into it.