Lexical
How I learned 3 languages in 3 years
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Hey HN, I'm Taylor and today I'm launching Lexical, a language learning app that actually works by teaching the 5,000 most common words in the target language.Spaced repetition is how I've learned Spanish, French, and Italian in the last 3 years and I couldn't find tools that have the languages that I want to learn in the future, so I built Lexical.The link goes to my White-Paper describing the language learning philosophy behind Lexical if you just want to try it out you can click "Get Started" at the top of the page. To really experience Lexical at it's best you'll need an account (sorry guys) but I've tried to make it as easy as possible.I'm a big fan of Hacker News and am looking forward to your comments and hopefully even some beta users.Here are some old HN posts that inspired my app and white-paper.Learning is remembering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982513Kanji only requires 777 words https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721736Most of language learning is temporary heuristics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907531Duolingo sucks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45425061
HN · launched Nov 11, 2025 · 9 upvotes (top 51%) · 0 views
Niche: language learning apps · 511 launches, 50 in the last 7 days ▼ -6% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 511 launches in language learning apps →
Could you build this?
Yes A spaced-repetition vocabulary application using public frequency dictionaries and an SRS algorithm like SM-2 is a classic CRUD web application.
Discussion
13 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Duolingo
Concerns raised: App is slow, performance issues with increased traffic, Submit button needs deactivation to prevent multiple submissions
Feature requests: Add Portuguese language support, Visualize word mastery progress with color-coded vocabulary bank, View entire bank of 5,000 words in app, Integrate grammar instruction into lessons similar to Duolingo, Pre-load audio to improve speed
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 381 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #173 of 382 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 13 days after the earliest competitor.
- KoKo · ph · 2026-10-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- LinguaFlow · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Léxico – Spanish Vocabulary · ph · 2026-10-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app · hn · 2026-01-15 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Learn English & Vocabulary AI · ph · 2026-10-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Phrasing.app · hn · 2025-11-07 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Loquus · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner · hn · 2026-02-13 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.50
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