About 10alect
A community-powered tool for learning languages through music 🎵
Paid Features Are Currently Disabled
Paid features such as gems, support, or any related purchase flow are currently disabled while this part of the project is being reworked.
The goal is to keep the core learning experience stable first, then revisit optional paid systems once the project structure is in a better state.
What is 10alect?
10alect helps you understand songs in foreign languages by providing word-by-word translations and morpheme breakdowns.
Unlike regular translations that give you sentence-level meanings, we align every source word with its translation counterpart. It's perfect for understanding grammar, idioms, and word structures!
🚧 Just a Side Project
I built 10alect because I wanted it to exist. It's currently running on a modest global VPS that costs about $10/month (not huge servers!).
I'm keeping the project lightweight and practical: free analysis stays the default, and the expensive parts are mostly the translation API calls.
⚙️ How It Works
OPUS-MT (Free)
Fast, open-source neural translation. Good quality. Uses daily Energy.
DeepL (Premium)
Industry-leading quality. Uses Gems (paid/earned).
Song analyses happen in our background queue system and are saved forever!
🔬 Under the Hood
- ▪️ Awesome Align: BERT-based word alignment model
- ▪️ spaCy: Morpheme analysis (roots, affixes)
- ▪️ DeepL API: For the premium translations
- ▪️ SvelteKit + FastAPI: The tech stack
- ▪️ SQLite (WAL): Crazy fast caching
Keeping it Running 🏃♂️
Since this is a side project, I want to keep the costs manageable while still offering high-quality tools.
The setup is simple: The server itself is cheap (~$10/mo), but the DeepL API charges per character translated.
That's why high-quality translations use more limited resources, while the standard flow sticks to the cheaper daily-energy path.
Daily Energy
The default path refills automatically and covers regular browsing, searching, and analysis runs.
Premium Translation Budget
DeepL-quality translations are the expensive part of the stack, so they stay on a more limited usage budget.
🎓 Use Cases
- ✅ Word-by-word grammar breakdown
- ✅ Vocabulary interaction in context
- ✅ Finding idioms that don't translate literally
- ✅ Pronunciation practice with synced lyrics
🌍 Languages
Start Deconstructing Songs
No signup required to browse the library. Join for free to analyze new songs!