Itsumo: Make yourself fun and interesting academic language lessons
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Itsumo is a language learning app that generates short lessons from stories about topics you choose, at your level. Instead of working through a fixed curriculum or another flashcard deck, you can make a lesson about whatever happens to be interesting to you that day, with audio, tappable words, and grammar notes.You can try a language story from the landing page without signing up, and if you want to try full access, no credit card is required at signup, and the premium tier free for 14 days. It supports Japanese, Polish, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French and Italian.I built it because I kept bouncing between two kinds of Japanese study tools: textbooks I liked but never had with me, and apps I always had with me but didn't actually want to open. What I wanted was something that felt closer to reading a lesson in a book than doing a drill, and I wanted it on my phone.There aren't a lot of apps out there targeting intermediate language-learners. I've been studying Japanese, and a lot of the tools are optimized either for complete beginners or for spaced-repetition-heavy review. That works for some people, but once I was past the basics, I wanted to practice in the context of a story that felt relevant to me.Technical details, since this is HN:- It's an Expo React Native app, and we're going for universal access. It's available on the web now, with mobile versions launching soon. - Created with a cool custom mobile studio I talked about here: https://youtu.be/ufgYlZCfRM4?t=643 - Lesson generation goes through an LLM pipeline with a verification pass to keep the output near the requested JLPT level.I'm especially interested in feedback from people who are somewhere in the middle with Japanese, where beginner material feels too basic but native material is still too much work. If you try it, I'd like to hear where it feels off, confusing, or not actually helpful.Give it try it: https://itsumo.studyBuilt by Margaret and Raf https://okthink.ai/
HN · launched Apr 8, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 45%) · 0 views
Niche: language learning apps · 511 launches, 50 in the last 7 days ▼ -6% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 511 launches in language learning apps →
Could you build this?
Yes Itsumo is a level-matched language reading app that feeds user prompts into an LLM with structured output, coupled with standard TTS APIs and interactive tokenized text.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 329 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #138 of 330 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 161 days after the earliest competitor.
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