Itsumo: Make yourself fun and interesting academic language lessons

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.study

Built by Margaret and Raf https://okthink.ai/