Building Another LingQ Clone

I don't feel like making a landing page right now, so I'll just write a blog post.

Goal: Building the best possible reading experience just one URL away

So why do I want to build another language-learning reading app?

If you've been in the space long enough, you might know that there have already been hundreds, if not thousands, of attempts at solving the "learning-languages and reading in your browser" problem. To the best of my knowledge, the most successful ones currently are LingQ and Readlang (the former being vastly more popular). Of course, there's a new project every week that tries to tackle this same problem space, but most never go anywhere.

Each of these "LingQ clones" comes with its own set of problems. I've tried a bunch of them, and in 100% of the cases I've seen, we end up with a buggy, cheaper product that has 20% of the features LingQ offers, without the niceties (like having an actual native mobile experience).

I don't blame the people building these products, because they’re usually solo devs competing with full teams working on a product for years.

LingQ and Readlang are not perfect either. We can do better.

Some complaints I feel and hear about both of these products are:

  • LingQ is kinda expensive
  • Readlang kinda lacks content (although it's using LLMs to fix this problem)
  • Reading on the phone is not fun for either product, at least in the browser.
  • Both suffer from bad tokenization for Asian languages; a common request is a way to manually fix those mistakes for public content.
  • Readlang can't be used without constant internet access

So, what's the solution? No one has solved it yet, so it must be a hard problem!

The solution in my mind is simple: We need a cross-platform solution that works offline, has great collaboration tooling, and offers a great mobile experience.

See? Simple.

6 Months of Building Later
  • Okay, so maybe it's not that simple (I thought I was doing things better, but somehow I too almost ended up adding another LingQ clone to the graveyard that is my private GitHub repo collection).
  • But from the experience of attempting to build a LingQ clone for the nth time, I think I now have a good understanding of the problem space. And now I have a few solutions in mind that might end our quest for finding the best language-learning reading platform:

    • Problem 1: Lack of Content

    Idea 1: Use GitHub as a Collaboration Platform

  • There should be an open-source repo that just hosts community-reviewed graded content.
  • GitHub is probably the best-kept secret from non-developers, and I think using it here would solve a lot of issues in the language-learning space.
  • Language learners should be motivated to contribute to this repo to get their writing reviewed by others who are possibly better at the language.
  • For Asian languages, parsing of text into words should be done through a PR on a public GitHub repo.
  • The content should be graded and declared in an open standard like Markdown so that any future language-learning app that wants to build a better reading solution is never gated by lack of content.

    • Problem 2: Accessibility

    Idea 2: Use Prebuilt UI Libraries for the App

  • Ideally, the project should be open-sourced and written in an open-source-friendly language so people can contribute and improve the overall experience based on their needs.

    • Problem 3: Usability with Bad Internet

    Idea 3: Offline/Local First

  • There's no need to make a network request for every action. Every action should be local by default.
  • The reader should have good customization, with a popup dictionary and word tracking that lets you look up and rate words without switching context (or dealing with network delays).
  • Of course, progress should be sync-friendly.

    • If one day something like this is possible, I’d be really happy :)