I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app
Details
- External ID
- 46633820
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I spent 10k hours building the perfect language learning app
- Website domain
- phrasing.app
- Launched
- Jan. 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5006587615283268
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hello HN -Over the last few years, I've been building an app to learn languages. It supports ~85 languages and ~40 dialects, and is optimized for learning and maintaining multiple languages.Learning a language is a ton of work, but really quite simple. Find text you're interested in, dissect and understand it, and review it often. Grind that every day for a few years, and you'll be fluent.So I built Phrasing for 4 main reasons:1. To have an app I would actually be excited to use every single day for years.2. To do all the research, explanation, prioritization, course planning and management for me, so I could just focus on learning3. To support learning multiple languages as a first class citizen4. To have a nice, unified interface to learn languages from Spanish to Arabic to CantoneseI've been using it daily now for almost a year to learn a variety of languages and I've been loving it. I have an awesome group of users in the Telegram channel who have been using it as well to great success.If you're a polyglot, an avid language learner, or someone who tried to use Anki in the past but found it wasn't for them — I think you might really like Phrasing :)EDIT: Phrasing is a paid application, but there are 30 expressions you can try for free in the islands tab (you'll see 10 of them in the onboarding flow as well)--PS: Phrasing uses FSRS under the hood, so a huge thank you to the FSRS team and Jarrett Ye for all the amazing work. Phrasing would not be the product it is without you!PSS: I'm documenting some of the latest updates on the blog this week, they're 50% product and 50% technical, might be of special interest to the HN crowd: https://phrasing.app/blog/launch-week-1
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai translation and localization tools
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- language learning application
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The UI and spaced repetition mechanics are straightforward, but sourcing, aligning, and curating cross-lingual sentence data across 85 languages and 40 dialects requires massive specialized data pipelines.
What it would actually take: The app requires a multi-platform frontend (React Native/Flutter/Web) backed by spaced repetition scheduling (FSRS or SM-2) and audio/text synchronization. The core difficulty lies in parsing, tokenizing, and accurately translating/aligning text and natural audio across 85 languages (including morphologically complex and low-resource languages). It requires significant NLP infrastructure and curation pipelines that exceed basic LLM wrappers.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Duolingo
Concerns raised: Pricing is very expensive for a language learning app, Homepage is too complex and reads like tech product not accessible app, Unclear if users need to know non-Latin characters before starting
Feature requests: Demo with popular languages (Spanish, French) instead of just Greek on homepage, Show supported languages as icons with text above the fold, Clearer comparison of features vs Duolingo to help users decide
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 185 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #96 of 186 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 78 days after the earliest competitor.
- Phrasing.app · hn · 2025-11-07 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.85
- I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner · hn · 2026-02-13 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- I made a crossword app for language learners · hn · 2026-04-06 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Lexical · hn · 2025-11-11 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I built a Chinese learning app that teaches through sentence patterns · hn · 2026-04-29 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Language Life · hn · 2026-03-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Learn Japanese contextually while browsing · hn · 2025-12-17 · 92 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Cadence Spanish · hn · 2026-01-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.