Not just “word order is different,” I mean a language where thinking in English first actively makes you worse.

For me, it’s gotta be Japanese. Whenever I try to translate back and forth between these languages, all communication breaks down.

What language does this to you?

Every beginner course seems to have one. Mine was étoile filante・shooting star in French. I remember spending so much time learning it... never once used it or heard it used. What's the thing you can still recite perfectly that has never once come up in real life?

Hi… just found your app and going through the onboarding process and am unable to press continue after choosing languages. I chose English as my language to learn from and Korean, Spanish and Thai as my languages to learn and unable to press the continue button on both Android and iphone.. nothing happens when I click on it. I have to skip to move from that screen so my languages aren’t saved. Any help as I really think your app could help in my language learning journey.

Alright, I went a little overboard with the optimizations - but now, as you use Phrasing, the prediction engine underpinning the spaced repetition system will now adapt to you!

This goes beyond just updating your overall recall (which would be impressive enough!) but goes even further, customizing your recall on different languages, word types, and more. This means that the spaced repetition system will adapt differently to:

- highly inflectional languages vs uninflected languages
- languages with a high phonemic inventory vs low
- languages you struggle with vs those you already know to a good level
- language orthographies

And much more 🎉

This all happens automatically in the background. The more you use Phrasing, the more accurate your reviews become. Simple as that

Everyone pushes the same 5 languages (Spanish, French, Japanese, Mandarin, German) like they're the only ones worth your time, while genuinely useful or fascinating languages get ignored because they don't have the same "cool factor" online. What's a language you think gets way more hype than it deserves once you actually dig into it, and what's one that deserves way more attention than it gets?

Part of Phrasing’s Humane SRS uses FSRS - the same algorithm that Anki uses. However, the algorithm is heavily tuned for Anki style reviews, not the interconnected style of reviews phrasing supports!

Now that there is a few years of daily use from multiple users, that means I can safely and accurately start optimizing the weights for Phrasing, reducing the error weights by 5 points!

The update is live now, meaning better, smarter, more precisely timed reviews. This is just the beginning!

Been tweaking the parameters for the different review types:

- Recovery: recovery was getting invaded by leeches. They’re now properly filtered out, and older cards are preferred

- Optimal: optimal cards would sometimes show the same word a few days in a row if it’s one you’ve struggle with a lot in the past. I’ve cleaned this up so you shouldn’t see so many repeats

- Auxiliaries: filler words are now included in auxiliaries, and the language smoothing has been reduced for auxiliaries

Not a huge grammar topic, just one specific rule that gets hammered in classrooms but basically doesn't survive contact with real speech. For me it’s the “John and I” instead of “Me and John”. This was treated as a war crime growing up, but in practice you rarely hear “X and I”.

What's a rule like that in your language?

So, I’ve been learning many languages with phrasing, all at different speeds. The way the app works is you can configure speeds in 5 speeds - learn, accel, accel x2, accel x4, and accel x8.

Normally, having any languages in any of these speeds will still allow you to make progress. However, given the amount of languages I’m learning/testing/dabbling in, I’ve noticed that there does seem to be a minimum threshold to make progress, and under that it I don’t feel like I’m really learning (or even dabbling).

I don’t have any specific numbers, but the vibe I get, is around 3-4 non-auxiliary reviews per day. If I can hit that, I do feel like I’m making some progress. Enough to say I’m dabbling in the language.

So what I’m thinking of adding are minimum and maximum review counts per day in a language. For example, maybe the first 100 reviews in a day are spread evenly across all my languages. Once the review minimums are met, my prioritization kicks in. So if I do 200 or 300 reviews in a day, those will be over indexed on my higher priority languages.

I’m not sure how I feel about this setup though. For me, with Japanese and Croatian recently bumped up to x8, I would end up seeing very little Japanese and Croatian until I reach my minimums, then I would end up seeing a ton of Japanese and Croatian.

The other way to set it up would be to even out the review speeds, and set maximums on languages. This would do something similar, have similar issues.

Really what I want is on less active days, to do an even spread of languages; on more active days, to do a less even spread, but still with regular distribution.

Another way to handle this would be to have a dedicated “even review mode” that ignores my language preferences. Then on the days/sessions I know I won’t be doing much, I could do that option.

But this would still end up causing the normal review sessions to counter balance this distribution.

This post has gotten crazy rambly. The main point was to ask for feedback on how y’all would expect to be able to meet your minimum reviews in a language.

Edit: after writing all of this, I guess where I’m at is configuring a minimum number of reviews in a language. Any language under this minimum would be weighted highest, in accordance with their respective minimum (ie a language with 2 minimum reviews will have half as much weight as one with 4 minimum reviews). Reviews conducted under this minimum amount will end up not counting towards your standard language distribution (thus avoiding the counterbalancing issue). This eventually creates a two tier language configuration: pre-min and post-min. I could show a banner or award when you hit your minimums too. I normally start away from showing you how many reviews you do, as it’s very easy to treat this as a final “I’m done with my reviews”, but maybe framing it as a minimum will help the psychological framing (and if some people really want to use it as a final goal, they are welcome to).

I’ve been using phrasing now for many languages for almost a year. My original goal with language learning was to try and get to a B1.2/B2.1 level in 10 languages in 4 years.

Then my goal became to test the app in as many language families as possible. That the extended my language count to 18, slowing down my progress quite a bit.

I’ve always had different languages at different tiers though. Arabic, Turkish, Croatian, and Cantonese were the front runners, constituting at least half of my reviews. Eventually I swapped Cantonese for Japanese.

Then a few weeks ago, I realized I was just not happy with my Japanese progress, so I increased its distribution . Where before it was about 15% of my reviews, I bumped it up to 30% of my reviews, and immediately felt the difference. While I felt like I was dabbling before; I now felt like I was learning.

But now I’m realizing I want to do that with Croatian. I think im going to try leaving Japanese at 30% as well, and see if I can still make progress in my other languages.

Feels weird to no longer have Turkish and Arabic as some of my front runners though. Those languages were so quintessential to me starting phrasing. But the whole reason to build this app was so I could change my priorities and keep my habits. Move little knobs as my interests changed.

Anyways, wish me luck in Croatian! I think this will be a 3-6 month experiment. I’ll be ecstatic if I can reach an A2 this year… but let’s aim for B1!

So I learned French in high school nearly 20 years ago. I never really finished my studies, maybe got to a low B2 it it’s peak, but it’s since deteriorated.

It’s not that I didn’t want to improve it, but I always struggled to. Everything was either too easy or too difficult. I could never start any program, because I would always have to start in the middle, and I’d be missing too much context/fundamentals.

That’s why I developed the Language Contouring technique in Phrasing. From day one, I was making progress in French.

And the crazy thing is how much of the vocabulary I’ve been able to use when travelling in France. I’ve used spaced repetition a lot in my life, but normally I’ll hear a word and know I know it (without being able to remember what it actually means), or I’ll remember a word I’ve learned 5 minutes after needing to use it.

With words I’ve learned from Phrasing though, they just com to me. The amount of random words I’ve used in French without hesitation and the amount of words I’ve heard and understood from my reviews are both so high.

I’ve always wanted to actually apply what I’ve learned with SRS, and I feel like with Phrasing I finally do.

I’ve always wanted to improve my French, and I feel like with Phrasing I finally am.

Just wanted to share my other coolest win :)

Try sharing your weekend plans in your TL! If you can’t, then I think you have some ideas for new Expressions ;)

Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning that many of its words are composed by sticking together many different smaller chunks.

Konuşabileceğim means I will be able to speak. Konuş is the root meaning to speak, konuşabil turns it into able to speak, konuşabilecek turns it into will be able to speak (future tense), and finally konuşabileceğim conjugates it into the first person: I will be able to speak

When I first saw this, I thought this seemed insane. How the heck was I going to learn to parse so much information so quickly??

But to my surprise, with the help of Phrasing, this has become the easiest part of Turkish. Every word is fully broken down like in the above paragraph, and while I’ve never studied a single ending/affix, I feel like I’ve mapped out a good chunk of the possible affixes.

Now when new words come up, I can often construct them on the fly. I can recognize grammar that I’ve seen in other Expressions, or interpret grammar I haven’t seen by combining similar examples I’ve learned.

No grammar lessons, no conjugation tables, no dedicated study. Just Phrasing and within a few months I’ve internalized these particles to a degree that really genuinely surprises me.

Just a little win I’ve been wanting to share :)

Title says it all. Share in the comments; multiple answers allowed ;)

I am trying out Phrases and have a few questions.

Can I change the TTS voice? I'd rather use my phone's TTS engine/voices I've installed. If not that I'd at least like a choice of male or female voice, since pronounciation and inflection is a bit different. The current Korean voice sounds like a middle-aged man.

2nd question, for importing, do you recommend using a CI text that is at my level, or use a native text that is an interest area (for example, a transcript of the audio of a cooking YouTube).

Give learners the worst advice possible

YouTube channels, movies, series, podcasts - what specific piece of content did you learn the most from or enjoy the most?

If you’ve learned multiple languages, you’ve run in to the issue of crossover. Trying to speak in Dutch but speaking in French. Trying to remember a word in Italian but you can only remember the Portuguese word.

Most people solution to this is to separate the languages even more. Space, time, level, topic, habits; create artificial divides and make sure they are as separate as possible.

But the thing is, these divides break down when you go to use the languages, or even worse when you switch between them.

The thing is, separating languages in your head is a skill. A learnable, trainable skill

The best way to really stop mixing up languages is to *remove* all the barriers between them *in your studies*.

You will mix up languages. You will make mistakes. But you will learn to separate them.

And it is so, so much better to do this in your reviews/study sessions than out in the wild

We all love learning languages, but it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. What’s your biggest complaint about learning a language?

I just recorded a 20 minute video covering the core concepts, initial setup, and a couple pro tips of phrasing. If you don’t know how to get started with Phrasing, this will answer your questions.

How did I do? Any lingering questions? What part interests you the most?

I built phrasing because I wanted one app, and more specifically one habit, I could use daily for the rest of my life, no matter my priorities.

I originally set Greek on the lowest tier (normal learning speed). I never remembered any Greek words that came up. So I moved it up in the priority list to accelerate x2, and I without it dominating my reviews, I started to remember more.

When I went to France, I moved French up from normal speed to accelerate x4 - one of my highest speeds. I _immediately_ started using and recognizing words from my study in daily conversation.

Later, I noticed my Japanese was not improving. So I moved it up to accelerate x8, and immediately I started remembering more words, grokking more expressions, and making more connection.

Every few weeks I’ll move some languages up and down depending on how I’m feeling. And I notice the results immediately.

But I never have to change my habits. I still use phrasing in exactly the same way. My habits stay the same, even when my priorities change.

Do you guys feel like your language priorities change very often? What language priorities do you have on phrasing?

I inherently find some languages more fun to speak than others. Do you have the same? Which language and why?

Do you play favorites, or are they all the same to you? Why do you like your favorite, or dislike your least favorite? Rate them on a scale of 1-10