I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the sentences is:
Front: I'm not happy.
Back: No soy feliz.
This doesn't seem correct to me.
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
Native Spanish speaker here (ES-MX, specifically, if it matters). I think this is one of the cases where a solid general rule breaks down in the specifics.
You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").
As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.
You are correct, but I'd say this one is fundamentally ambiguous (I'm Portuguese myself, where this also applies), as it is a one-to-two mapping here. Without further context you can't really choose one or the other, so we just left it as is :).
I've always found it most painful trying to figuring out when to use verbs that translate to other verbs depending on context. It's just personal experience of course, so not sure if it really matters that much between all languages or types of learning.
Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.
One feedback can you have tooltips/labels for the "Available Languages" section. Personally speaking my limited familiarity with flags makes it tough to find out how many languages are available.
Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck, the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.
I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."
I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
Yes. At Deckmill (https://deckmill com) we hated subscriptions for language products, so we built a language product that you buy once and get the content forever (much like a book).
It's possible (likely) that Alameda has invested that money in iliquid assets or assets that have since lost value. Also, since the loans of FTX to Alameda were backed by FTT, which has since collapsed, even if FTX makes a margin call, the collateral has a fraction of the original value.
Get access to all our decks for just €14.99.
All our content for one low price - buy it and it's yours forever.
Forget trivial badges, locked levels and guilt-tripping owls, and say hello to actual language skills.
I'd like to point out that this seems extremely similar to Nimbo (https://nimbo.sh), to the extent that even some of the terminal messages are exactly the same, and even parts of the docs are copy pasted. E.g:
Nimbo docs: "In order to run this job on Nimbo, all you need is one tiny config file and a Conda environment file (to set the remote environment), and Nimbo does the following for you:"
SpotML docs: "In order to run this job on SpotML, all you need is one tiny config file and a Docker file (to set the remote environment), and SpotML does the following for you:"
Yes we liked the elegance of both the tool and the docs. So it's very much inspired from it.
I must also give credit to another great tool https://spotty.cloud/ from which this project was adopted.
Optics on direct copying without attribution aren't great for trust in open source software. Count me out and thanks for pointing me to the place where people are _actually_ working in the open/cooperatively.
Otherwise, this idea is interesting and probably generalizable to other applications. Maybe it's not crystal clear to me, but what are the advantages of your service over existing solutions such as Nimbo and Spotty? FWIW it might be worthwhile adding this to your website.
Thanks, Makes sense.
It doesn't use any "code" from nimbo. The documentation and the design simplicity of the tool were the things that was appealing to us and adopted.
The project itself was forked from spotty which has an MIT license.
The biggest advantage which was missing in the Open source options was monitoring on the training job and auto recovery from spot interruptions which spotML does.