Non-native English speakers, I want to hear from you.
Even though I don't speak it natively, I write in English very often. Every time I start writing a new text, Grammarly is at my side. Thank you so much, Alex, Max, and Dmytro. You created something great! With the assistance brought me by Grammarly, I can identify and fix grammar mistakes. I reorganize words to make my copy clearer, engaging and impactful. But if English is not your mother tongue, Grammarly faces some limits.
At the start of the past year, I wrote a Cover Letter to compete for a position at Basecamp. Along with my text, I wanted to use a metaphor. After all, Basecamp is the "cradle" of Rails. But how to be sure that "cradle of" would express in English the same meaning this metaphor has in Portuguese (my native language)?
Another common situation is to make sure about the correct prepositions. Grammarly will tell you whether they are grammatically incorrect, but this is not enough. In the following examples, both prepositions are right: a) I am in the hospital, b) I am at the hospital. However, they have very different meanings.
As you see, metaphors and prepositions are obstacles that Grammarly can't help us to overcome. So I want to hear from you, non-native English speakers: How do you handle these issues? Have you found a tool able to solve them?
Thanks in advance for every suggestion, feedback, or insight!
Rafa, this is a great insight about English and one that I think about regularly. I grew up in Brazil, my mom is American (and teaches English remotely), and it's a regular complaint I hear from LATAM entrepreneurs who want to communicate/express themselves on the web. Think the @Linguix team is here too so maybe they have something to say.
Currently having an editor (who was also a Portuguese/English speaker) write a review of grammar checkers. Would you be interested to send me some copy to include in the test (versions from before you run it through grammarly!) so we can see which ones, if any, catch some of the nuance/idiom/metaphor troubles you're running into?
My current best startup guess for solving this would be: https://www.poliglota.org/ but it's really because I have had a touchpoint with the founders and not used or tested the product. Also happy to put you in touch with my mom who provides affordable private lessons. We're thinking of putting together a group if there are enough folks interested.
A wonkier approach, with no guarantees of effectiveness would be to run the parts of your content you want to add more color to through an ML, suggestions in tooltip.com/blog/ai-writing-assistant, to see what crops up then edit according to your best discernment.
Thank you so much for the insights, Gabriel!
I just took some notes of the references you shared to inspect them in details later. Regarding private lessons or the use of ML, I am actually building a software that tries to fill the gaps I described on my post. It's a pet product and I did it to meet my own needs with English. Since I got curious about how all the other non-native English speakers were solving this issue, I thought Indie Hackers would be an interesting place to start a discussion :)