u/thelambie

I built a free, open-source web app called Aoede to address a specific, very common problem in self-study language learning: many learners make real progress in reading, writing, and even speaking, yet are still unable to understand what the other person in a conversation is saying, even after years of study.

Aoede is designed specifically for listening-comprehension practice. Here's how you use it:

• choose a book
• listen to the book read aloud in the language you are studying, sentence by sentence
• if necessary, listen to sentence again as many times as you want
• if necessary, view the text of the sentence in the language you are studying, your own language, or both (even if the book isn't either of those languages)
• then continue

A few things that make Aoede different:

• requires no account, login, download, or installation
• runs as a web app on phones and laptops
• lets you choose any of the public domain books on Project Gutenberg (an intelligent search tool is provided)
• allows you to build a personal library of those books and remembers where you are in each book
• supports many combinations of user language, study language, and book language
• provides adjustable automatic sentence simplification
• allows speaking speed adjustment and an optional articulation mode

Aoede has been in production for about a year.

Site: https://aoede.pro
GitHub: https://github.com/LindsayRidgeway/aoede

I’d be very interested in feedback from people who care about listening comprehension or self-study language learning.