Treasury
Treasury is an iOS app I made for learning a language by reading AI generated CEFR-appropriate renditions of classic public-domain novels.
I have found it hard to find Albanian content that is a good balance of interesting, level appropriate, and long form. Reading long form is helpful because it allows you to use the context you've been building up to infer what new words or phrases might mean without having to look up a translation. If you can understand most of the content, you can pick up new words naturally. But it's hard to read full novels like the ones I've purchased from bookstores on my trips to Albania because they just have way too many unfamiliar words. Reading becomes more like decoding where you need to decipher each word, totally negating the benefits of reading.
I was inspired remembering how when I was young and learning to read, I had a box set of kid-friendly versions of classic novels called the "Treasury of Illustrated Classics". It was exciting looking at the covers and daydreaming about the stories when you got to them. Some of my favorites were Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. I needed something akin to this plethora of exciting options for learning Albanian and I wondered if I might not be able to get ChatGPT to write me Albanian translations at my level.
With a ChatGPT pro subscription in hand, I coaxed the model into creating a near-full-length epub ebook that I could read on iPad and it was so good! It was so fun to be able to understand most of what was going on and actually get immersed in the Albanian for one of the first times. It was a magical experience and I wanted more.
I decided to create Treasury as a way to more consistently and easily create these ebooks and audiobook in any language for myself and my mom who is learning Spanish. I wanted to publish the app to the app store, but Apple was taking months (literally months) to approve my developer account Individual -> Business change. Oh well.
Repo: github.com/mark-cd-hudson/treasury
Status
Proof of concept.