One more thing, just in general: Some people are complaining that some languages work better than others. This seems to be a common issue now with the availability of AI (both voice recognition and LLMs): there's a temptation to expand into as many languages as possible, simply because you can.
My advice would be to have languages default to an "alpha" state, and only progress them to "beta" and "1.0" state when they reach certain milestones, as defined by community feedback.
Agreed. That's why the exercises are only there for a couple of selected languages. But even there it can be tricky. The model is less confident in Dutch than in English, so I have to experiment a bit with what is best for having a variety of content and quality.
I've checked out the Japanese one, but I'd say that it's definitely no where near "real-world content" IMO. Just the usual tortuously slow-paced, artificially dumbed-down dialogue you'd expect out of classroom recordings.
Most of the videos also contain subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the exercises (you can disable the video manually though). Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally (e.g. [み][ません]), so it's unclear how you're expected to fill them in.
In the end if what you really want is "real-world content", then you just need to go out there and find them yourselves - they're everywhere.
It's a bit like segmenting "don't see" into "don't" and "see." ません is the negative of the auxiliary ます just as "don't" is the negative of the auxiliary "do." If you have to split Japanese text into words and want to be principled about it, treating ません as a separate word is not a bad way to go about it.
But of course there are other ways, so a "fill in the blank" question with two gaps right next to each other is generally a bad idea.
The point is not that you can't cut みません into み and ません. The point is that it should be one single gap in the first place.
It's like cutting gaps out of English sentence like this: I'm [go][ing] to beat the shit out of that guy. Sure we know the logical way to break down 'going' is 'go' and '-ing', but it should be one single gap anyway.
+1 this definitely makes sense, since you're gonna have a million verbs ending in "masen", just make it a separate word and understand that it's just part of the conjugation.
Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.
I actually like the default looping. When I’m learning and trying to train my ear, I need to listen to the phrase over and over and it’s helpful to not have to click play again.
You didn’t even read the most basic settings that clearly say “click and drag interface” or something similar. But I still agree, tapping/clicking should work in sequential order eventually (it’s not as easy to implement).
Re, looping; there are controls to turn it off. You aren’t paying attention one bit. If you’re going to say things, at least be diligent in the things you are going to address.
I also don't read all of the terms and conditions, and I feel free to get mad at unreasonable items that I discovered while using the product. Fight me.
Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.
But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.
> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
True but then I remember that most people are just paying for the feeling. There's millions to be made actually teaching people stuff (learning is hard) but there are billions to be made making people feel like they are.
That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares
> rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo
I disagree that it's an illusion. People are learning a new language when using Duolingo, but 5-10 minutes/day means it will take a long time before they are proficient. Someone else linked to the state department website showing 550-690 hours of learning required on the English adjacent languages.
Thanks! Competing with the giant like Duolingo is hard. But I believe that there is an edge, especially if these transcription models keep improving. I find them quite good already but simple mistakes are very off-putting.
> Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America
Will do!
> Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)
I'm working on splitting it up in easy/normal videos. That should be do-able to assess.
> Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)
I'm thinking about creating a browser plugin where you can tick a box to automatically import it into Fluentsubs. Or create an exercise from an existing video. It will take minutes before it is fully transcribed but it can be a nice way to prep your own content without people blaming me that I serve biased content.
I'm not sure though if people are willing to install browser plugins. I'm always a bit weiry with plugins that are invasive on websites like YouTube.
One minor but very nice aspect of the UX is that I was able to click the link and immediately try it out. I wasn't even planning to really use it but ended up completing a round. My only complaint is that the drag and drop is kind of annoying as the default selection process, clicking would feel more natural.
For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.
This is so good! I've been looking for a tool that will simulate the "listen to the Spiderman movie 50x" experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eliB_y0fmSk and this site can do it!
I'm working on improving the feedback. It is a bit confusing since some words are very similar so you have no idea what went wrong.
I checked the Italian video. But I don't fully understand: https://imgur.com/a/YcF3dnb . It doesn't pick qualcuno as a filler word. Is it still broken?
Just a quick note – the "Configure Your Exercise" step was a bit confusing. It took me a while to figure out what “Number of Gaps” even meant, since that’s not something I’d usually think about configuring.
Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.
Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.
Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.
If that's true then why include it at all? From a UX perspective you don't want to throw a bunch of configuration options at the user before they even know what the options mean.
It's a hurdle people have to take; and its eating from their 1.5second attention span. Some will get stuck or leave. OP asked for thoughts, this is to help him convert more people.
I just tried the Dutch (my native language) version, and it looks neat, but at some point it asked me to type Emmeloord, which is a small town in the Netherlands. That would be very challenging for someone learning the language without being relatively familiar with the Netherlands, so maybe you can tell the LLM to avoid names?
Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.
Thanks! It is available on Desktop immediately after you finish a segment. I'm thinking of bringing it back to mobile. I made it a toggle to save some space on small devices
Just a friendly heads up, for the Japanese exercises the video starts just a bit too late and the word you're listening for is cut off. This might only be pertinent for languages where vocab words are appearing at the beginning of sentences, French and Spanish didn't have "gap words" at their sentence start for the few exercises I tried.
This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.
My biggest complaint about Duolingo is the lack of feedback about how to improve. There are several words whose pronunciations I think I correctly have but the app doesn't understand my pronunciations ever. There are also some words whose dictionary translations aren't provided or are used differently than the translation help offers. Without feedback to ask questions and get answers it's very frustrating.
I'm using AssemlbyAI and Deepgram for the transcripts at the moment. Unfortunately, they don't support Irish. However, I did see this: https://elevenlabs.io/speech-to-text/irish . Not sure how accurate it is.
The few UX things can make for a really frustrating experience. You don’t want to push away your users in their first testing.
1. Change the word “gaps” to “blanks” for English audiences. It fits the common phrase “fill in the blanks” better. And maybe call it that too.
2. Don’t make the blocks move around for the drag and drop. It makes for a frustratingly slow process to find where the word you were about to grab moved to.
3. Don’t just correct a wrong answer, show what the user chose. I had too many moments where I was convinced the answer was what I had selected. Even using the red/green doesn’t quite make sense if you’ve replaced an incorrect answer with a now correct answer.
3. Consider doing the check after all words have been dropped in so they can read the sentence as a whole. And thus give them the chance to change their word choice.
Thank you! I'm trying to push new updates to a sub-reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fluentsubs/ . Simply adding support for manually transcribing videos should be quick to add. However, it also greatly depends on how quick these transcription models get better.
Super cool that you've got Dutch as well! I make https://hetnederlands.com, would be happy to do a link exchange or something like that. Feel free to get in touch lars@hetnederlands.com
Would love to see a way to understand the english equivalent of each word. As it stands now you aren't really expanding your vocab if you are just listening and copying what they say without knowing the word's meaning.
Nice, tried it. Looks cool. On the phone the drag and drop is a bit tricky. Dropped a wrong word and it got score emediatly as wrong, even though I was going to fix it. I expected scoring to happen after I click "submit".
But maybe that's the same in Duolingo, no idea.
Thanks for trying. Yes this is on the roadmap. I think it is more intuitive for phones to click, and then hit submit instead of dragging (especially with large fingers hah)
I tried Japanese; the Youtube video that autoplayed had its timing slightly off so that instead of saying あたまも疲れました I only heard まも疲れました. It was pretty confusing but fortunately the answer was displayed right in the video because the video itself had its text spelled out.
I think one other point to consider in the content filtering: One of the first examples that was shown to me had in-video subtitles, which made the exercise too trivial, as the answers were essentially given away.
I absolutely love the idea. I would honestly use this. However, when I tried the English learning, it incorrectly marked words wrong several times. Something to check out.
The words were correct in the YouTube subtitles, both in spelling and sequence. It must have been a problem with the transcription or some other bug (whitespace?)
I love having real sentences -- so much more engaging than the random things made up by Duolingo!
What are your long-term plans with this? I'd love at some point to be able to combine something like this with an algorithm I'm working on called Guided Immersion.
Basically, the system tracks what words you know and don't know, and so could tell you how hard a given sentence is for you. And it also tracks what words it would be useful to review and/or learn (spaced repetition and frequency analysis), to tell you how valuable a sentence would be for you.
The algorithm is generic and can be adapted to any language; right now it's been adapted to Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and New Testament Greek. (Which unfortunately so far doesn't seem to overlap with any of your available languages.) I'm working on an API to allow any content providers to use the algorithm.
Adding this to your system could help focus the content you're showing people to things that they're likely to be able to understand without having to look up most words, and helping them incrementally grow and solidify their vocabulary using the built-in spaced repetition.
Drop me a line if you want to chat at some point -- my email is in my about.
I'd straight up pay 5 or 10 bucks a month for this if it was like... 200% more functional/featured/professional/working. VERY good proof of concept and I love it. Target language is german fwiw.
Thanks for the feedback! It is indeed a PoC that I'm hacking together after work.
I've been working hard to get the quality up. And now that I have some paid users for the large languages I can also auto-transcribe high quality channels. Main reason for the poor exercises (especially for German) was that I initially picked some poor channels and I was being cheap.
I've updated the german channel and that should hopefully result in a better experience.
I only checked English, French, Dutch and German and assumed that Spanish would be OK. Was this for drag & drop. And do you maybe have the video? Maybe I need to tune the quality threshold specifically for Spanish videos.
I actually did the same video on desktop and the same answers worked fine! Screenshots of it failing in an android webview, but passing on desktop firefox: https://imgur.com/a/vALlFdH.
I tried the japanese one, as an A1, I can't read/don't know kanji yet, would be nice to have an option to see katakana/hiragana only, an option to have furigana and an option to see the kanji. Also would like an option to save phrases and not just a word. but likes it overall
Thank you! It should store the word and the sentence so that rehearsal is always with both.
I focussed a lot on European languages at first so the support for the Asian languages is a bit lacking. The only thing I did so far was changing the font and increasing the font size. There is a lot more to do! Thanks!
Hey, this looks really nice and worked like a breeze for French!
Question: out of the processing steps you mention - transcription, quality filtering, segment selection, and (I guess) wrong-word selection) are there any truly manual steps? Those would be the ones that prevent you from building this for just about any language that has good transcription available, right?
There are no manual steps. But it is hard to gatekeep quality. The transcription models work well for the large languages but not so much for the smaller ones.
It looks great - nice work. I tried the french example and found it challenging and useful - a great addition to my duo lingo practice. So much so that I signed up. But in doing so I lost the credits that Id apparently acquired by completing the example which was a little disappointing. I hadnt seen the Easy French videos before - they look nice too.
I am a audio-visual learner and on Duolingo, which I am currently using to learn Spanish, my biggest problem is, that I have not a real visual for the words. Sure sometimes you get a picture for single substantives, but learning via video and watching mouth movements is so much better for me.
So this is a welcome tool I am definitively gonna check out.
It would be nice to limit the YouTube content a bit like not just news, but an option for news in slow French, or something else. At least for me news in slow French is way easier to understand than news in French at 0.5x in you tube.
Maybe it's just my phone, but the dragging and dropping wasn't hit or miss it was mostly broken. On an English speaking video (my native language) filling in three gaps took me like five video repetitions to get the words in place. It made me feel a lot better about my Spanish speaking performance. Just clicking the words like someone else suggested would solve the problem completely for me, but it might be like a "hit box" problem on the words.
After 4 retries, the spinner finally gave up but it incorrectly said "Sorry, no exercise available for this language today." and not, as it should have, "We were unable to load the exercises. Try again later, or contact support at ${email}"
---
The AppSec-er in me wants to point out that returning the version of nginx that you're using is an antipattern since it enables more targeted attacks if the version has woes; it does it in the error, and it does it in the headers
Thanks for reporting! I'll fix the Nginx version exposure.
Yes, the server got knocked out. I was not expecting this much traffic hah.
I already upgraded it but I have an NLP server with 10 language models loaded and it seems to be grinding CPU resources.
As a resident Duolingo apologist this is certainly awesome! I appreciate how little landing-page fluff there was before I could give it a shot. I tried Japanese and felt it was only reasonable in tandem with my in-built translation extension, since Kanji-reading knowledge itself is a major hurdle of learning. Furigana would really help this, but personally, being able to translate the words I pick helps a lot during the challenge of hearing new vocabulary in native Japanese.
As well, I am learning multiple languages, and noticed that the settings panel seems to be the way to switch between them. I think it's a little unnatural to force a user to do this, but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly. The pricing itself seems reasonable and I appreciate that I can feel the app out for free.
I focussed first on European languages as I'm learning French. But I'll put some more effort in improving the Japanese experience since it seems to be very popular.
> but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly.
Would a language selection box at the top be enough? Or do you mean a more elaborate way to switch between languages?
For me, the main interest would be to switch the interface for one language to another in ideally 1-2 clicks; so if there was an interface element that captured the languages I was 'working on' that would be neat. Then I'd be happy to peruse the full list whenever curiosity spikes.
Otherwise, great work on a good use of existing technologies to provide meaningful educational benefit for yourself and others!
That's neat !
Although I got an issue on the Finnish challenge, when I drag the (correct) word "koho" it transforms into the (incorrect) word "koko". I thought I missclicked and tried the whole challenge again but I reproduced it despite being very careful.
Thanks for trying, and sorry about that. I thought that the videos for Finnish where on a decent enough level (only checked one). I'm afraid the transcription quality is not on par yet for Finnish. I'll add a warning for the smaller languages and hopefully the models will improve.
Beautiful work. this has massive potential. I like the video aspect - it's almost as how people learned languages back then by listening to CDs and Tape. but now you can read someone's lips
Just did one spanish video, worked really well. The interface is simple enough and easy, great start.
It would be great to have a translation appear after completing the words, and maybe a way to save words.
This feels like a great blend of immersion and repetition. Curious if you’re doing any difficulty adaptation based on content complexity or vocabulary frequency?
It's a good idea and something I will be interested in using
However, I was very confused by the interface at first. I started a with a 3 gap exercise. I dragged what I thought was the correct word into the gap. Listened again, changed my mind but I couldn't drag in my new choice. It was a while before I realised that the correct word had been inserted for me. This was despite me not completing the other gaps.
It would be better if the answers weren't given until the user submits the answer.
Thanks for trying! Sorry about that. I've changed the daily exercise to an easier one for Japanese. Right now it takes random videos from all levels for the exercises, but I'm working on creating one simple one and a more challenging one.
Thanks! I decided on it because I think people are fed up with subscription systems and it was easy to implement. However, I made two sales (yay! first time ever) but I paid $20 today to DeepL. I might change it in the future.
Looks real nice. I'll be using it. If you could map spacebar to pause/unpause the video by default (without focusing on the YouTube window first) that would be great.
The click and drag UX is cool. BUT, it’s super annoying that it reorganizes every time you drag one off. So the next one you may have been looking to drag has now moved (or it means you accidentally grab the incorrect one). Can they stay in their positions? (Eg, replace in place with a greyed out version of the removed word)
Hmm, embedded youtube videos just do not work for me anymore. Maybe because I have too many privacy extensions enabled in firefox. I just get the "sign in to prove you're not a bot" message, and no way to sign in except manually opening youtube and trying to find the same video.
News is good because it is inherently more interesting than any old video vs having to curate a bunch of interesting videos. It's also good that the videos loop—most tools that have tried to sync videos seem to never autoloop which means you have to keep manually playing it which is annoying.
Some improvements:
Increase the amount of exercise videos for the pro subscription—I only see three and only one new 2min video per day. The format is good enough to be a regular learning tool. I'd rather see a wall of pro-only videos when evaluating whether I went to subscribe. You want to give a sense of immediate value via backlog that the user will unlock since the impulse buy is that I get to immediately do a bunch of exercises because I loved the teaser exercise.
I think the ideal is that I like the demo lesson, I register, I click the exercises list to do another exercise, and I see a bunch of paywalled interesting videos that I'll be able to watch&learn, so I pay right there on the spot after clicking a video that I wanted to listen to.
Exercises:
- Alphabetize the word list so they are easier to find. Takes me forever to find words in this kind of setup, same on Duolingo.
- Allow text input even with the word list visible. The exercise customization option would then just be "Show word bank: boolean".
These are some really awesome ideas for UX, thank you!
And I agree. The value from "Pro" should be very clear. What do you think about the one-time payments? Do you think that works or should it be a subscription?
I wonder if this could be used as something like early recaptcha.
Have a machine do transcriptions and for the parts where it's not entirely sure just let users play the game and then accept what most users chose as the correct solution. Later on train your automatic transcriber on this.
Pretty cool honestly, very nice job. The UX is well made, no distractions, you can consider doing several small sessions during the day to learn during breaks. I love it! I would personally be quite interested in Chinese (in that case, I would strongly recommend putting the accents on latin characters, otherwise users cannot know how to pronounce).
I tried Spanish and Japanese. A tiny recommendation for Japanese: it would be nice to have both kanjis and hiraganas in the same block for the word choices. That way, you can decouple the learning of kanjis from the pure listening.
Great idea. However, the clip I got was spoken so fast that if I was able to actually understand any of it I think I wouldn't be learning Spanish as I'd have already mastered it.
Awesome idea! Do you plan to add Portuguese soon? I found it surprising that Dutch is in there before it given there are far fewer speakers. Was this related to the amount of content available?
Thanks! And yes I'll add it soon. I'm Dutch so I could validate the videos.
> Was this related to the amount of content available?
Yes, Portuguese is available in the app, but I only transcribe the Easy Portuguese videos for now so I don't have a lot of content available at the moment.
I checked the Portuguese content available and you should clarify it's Brazilian (and change the flag to the Brazilian one so it doesn't induce in error).
I'm curious now: how do you transcribe the videos? And how do you align the transcript with the video (in terms of timing)? Are there libraries doing that?
Aj, sorry about that. I think it is YouTube blocking you. I didn't think of that edge case yet so I think my app will keep trying to play the video. Thanks for the report.
Mines' the same. My local firewall blocked the site when the YouTube embbed tried to play, and when I switched to my work VPN it blocked the domain altogether.
I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo. It has brought me from zero to scoring 96% on this test – I didn’t realise I was so advanced!
I love the concept and the execution. This is a rare instance of a Show HN that I not just admire, but can easily see myself using regularly and paying for.
Please, please monetise this in such a way as to avoid enshittification.
1) Let us keep the right sidebar permanently out, and DON'T grey out the rest of the screen. I want to be able to click on target language words and immediately see them. Like, you've given us the translated sentence, but I can't see which word is which;
2) Colour _the same words_ in both languages when doing mouseover;
3) Or just highlight BOTH as we're listening [but note issue below!];
4) Make the keyboard use a bit more intuitive - i.e. left/right obviously means "go back or forward in the video/audio", but now I have to CLICK on the yt video again to get that behavior. It should be auto so I don't have to do that. Similarly, I want to click on a word to know it's meaning, but then go back to space->pause behavior. Rn clicking a word breaks that. Just adds friction to users.
5) Consider yt-dlp to save the videos so if we are studying one, and yt pulls it, we can keep using. Maybe for the roadmap.
6) Consider allowing us to add words to vocab -- and which vocab -- directly from mouseover [without clogging up UI - not sure there]. Right now it's a bit convoluted [right sidebar, which again should be permanent and integrated, not greying out the main screen - but even if that was fixed, that's a lot of mouse movement]
6) Handle idiomatic language issues better. You'll probably need another LLM pass/method for this, but IT'S a BIG ONE! Languages don't map 1:1 obviously, so for example this one:
"genommen" was translated as "taken" <- means nothing.
I dump into 4o and it explains
In the phrase „genau genommen“, the word „genommen“ is part of a fixed idiomatic expression and doesn't translate literally as "taken."
„Genau genommen“ means "strictly speaking" or "to be precise."
So the full sentence:
„Wir sind heute wieder auf der Straße unterwegs, genau genommen auf dem Flohmarkt…“
translates to:
"Today we're out on the street again — strictly speaking, at the flea market…"
It’s specifying or narrowing down what “on the street” means in this context.
**
So you'll need to pull out these idiomatic phrases and then make sure they can be analysed as a single unit, so to speak. Learners are gonna have to be acquainted with those, and now the workflow is obviously broken.
Basically just get a model to bundle them and then in the sidebar on the right that has like "drill into X" you've got the PHRASE as a unit of analysis.
1. Makes sense!
2./3. That's a bit hard, but like point 6 I think it is possible to map certain parts.
4. Makes sense
5. I put it on the roadmap but I think it is not so much of a priority now. I want to have an offline mode at a certain point (as well as a dedicated app)
6. Yes, this is hard and expensive. But I think that I should have a high quality section with proper quality control. I have some ideas to quickly create lessons as a teacher, but right now I'm mainly firefighting stability and quality
For 2/3 — isn’t it just another api call to get the mappings [solving 6 as a side effect] then somehow wiring it up to the frontend like you already do?
The sidebar greying out the foreground now and not able to stay locked REALLY breaks flow. Fixing that slightly mitigates.
I tried the japanese version. I like that you are using real Japanese language YouTube videos. You can see the kanji on the videos though so it kind of defeated the point. Hide the video? Great idea though and very fun too.
Did you hand-pick the videos? My first one was some Elon Musk conspiracy dumpster and the second one some church “morality” thing… I think it’s a good example of what not to do with LLMs.
Also, your page needs to disclose any content filtered by or generated by a model.
No I let the LLM filter on "non-war and non-politics" but I don't have a ton of content available (yet) so it might picked something that was not great. Which language did you try?
That meme is such a load of hogwash. In many ways, US English is closer to "traditional" than UK English. They've both diverged somewhat from what they were in the 17th century. Neither form has been "simplified" in any way.
As for the Union Jack: the UK has at least 3 rather different languages (English, Gaelic, Welsh), possibly a few more depending on how you count the different kinds of Gaelic.
Using a country flag to represent a language has always struck me as being silly. Only rarely do they map 1-to-1.
It's entirely a joke based on the two different versions of "Chinese" offered on most websites, it's not really meant to be taken seriously. But I've heard that there's an island in New England somewhere whose local accent is closest to Elizabethan English.
> Some people have characterised Tangier’s way of speaking as ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Restoration’ English, but that’s nonsense. Languages aren’t static and the Tangier dialect has changed a lot because of its isolation. It’s a distinct creation of its own," Shores said.
Yeah, but there is a real difference between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Traditional are more ornamental/complicated while simplified are ... simplified/minimalist .
It's primarily a reference to various language selection dropdowns offering "Chinese (Traditional)" (which is used in Taiwan) and "Chinese (Simplified)" (which is used on the Chinese mainland). That difference arises from Mao-era simplification of many of the most common hanzi characters to make them easier to write or distinguish.
Mixed with, yes, the variant spellings and word choices (e.g. chips/crisps/biscuits) that make it apparent to British English readers when something is American.
I think my confusion is more from the implication that variant spellings imply "simplification"—even at a glance, simplified and traditional hanzi differ greatly in complexity, whereas I don't see how "chips" is any simpler than "crisps", even as a joke....
EDIT: Of course, it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things—feel free to ignore my pedantry over a silly joke :-)
This really isn’t a positive point. Flags represent nations, not languages, and it can be quite offensive to equate the two.
To use your example, there are plenty of Irish people who speak English but would resent being forced to identify with the Union Flag.
For another example that is very relevant today, there are plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who hate Russia. Using the Russian flag to represent them would at best be distasteful.
That's actually a really good point that seems obvious, but I hadn't considered before. I wonder what a better solution is. ISO language codes[1], I guess?
Of the five languages I have configured in KDE, three of them are country-specific. So I use the flag indicator, which is far quicker for me to locate and identify out of the corner of my eye than would be a text label (which would require using the retina and thus more time and attention).
Sure, fine for personal uses. I mean broadly and generally.
As for English, the United States has far and away the largest number of native English speakers.
Not that I think the stars and stripes has any more right to represent “English” as a concept any more than the Union Jack. If you’re going on origin, why not the flag of England instead?
I mostly meant that facetiously as now we're entering the linguistic quagmire of trying to pin down an exact origin for a language, and furthermore (depending on your chosen definition of "English") the language itself predates the current flag of England, so even that is open to debate regarding its appropriateness.
The moral is: don't try to draw boxes around languages.
All that said, I do understand why someone would want to use flags as shorthand for language. It's wrong, but it's useful.
Rather ironic, considering that it’s a flag to indicate personal union of ownership of subjects and lands by the Scottish king who inherited the subjects and lands of England, but you prefer it to be the icon for the language of the state of England, a country in which its own language is more or less indecipherable in many places due to accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.
You would be far more likely to understand any given English speaking person in the USA than in England. It should really be called American at this point.
> accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.
There are just as many accents and dialects of English in the Americas as there are in Britain. Even your term "creolization" comes from Louisiana. It's a matter of perspective and something that all language learners will have the face, the difference between 'standard' English/Spanish/German and regional variations both within it's originating country and from abroad.
Clearly I’m in the minority, but I found the idea awful. The execution on the exercises is good—I especially like that you mix similarly sounding words—but my first thought as soon as I read your description was that the news are a terrible, worrying choice which could be misused to push a specific agenda on learners. Lo and behold, first thing I try is Musk’s dad calling people bums. Learners shouldn’t be subjected to polarised opinions at the same time they are trying to internalise words. Use instead some neutral science channels like Veritasium, CGP Grey, or Vsauce.
I agree that channels should be checked more carefully. I initially added two news channels per language. But some of those are pretty horrible (like Skynews). I'll put some more time in adjusting the channels. For example, TF1 is really great for French. It can be colored but it has many non-political or more local items.
I picked news channels because they often have short well spoken videos.
One more thing, just in general: Some people are complaining that some languages work better than others. This seems to be a common issue now with the availability of AI (both voice recognition and LLMs): there's a temptation to expand into as many languages as possible, simply because you can.
My advice would be to have languages default to an "alpha" state, and only progress them to "beta" and "1.0" state when they reach certain milestones, as defined by community feedback.
Agreed. That's why the exercises are only there for a couple of selected languages. But even there it can be tricky. The model is less confident in Dutch than in English, so I have to experiment a bit with what is best for having a variety of content and quality.
I've checked out the Japanese one, but I'd say that it's definitely no where near "real-world content" IMO. Just the usual tortuously slow-paced, artificially dumbed-down dialogue you'd expect out of classroom recordings.
Most of the videos also contain subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the exercises (you can disable the video manually though). Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally (e.g. [み][ません]), so it's unclear how you're expected to fill them in.
In the end if what you really want is "real-world content", then you just need to go out there and find them yourselves - they're everywhere.
> Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally
I immediately noticed that too. Are the "gaps" generated by an LLM? I think the model might not understand Japanese very well.
It's a bit like segmenting "don't see" into "don't" and "see." ません is the negative of the auxiliary ます just as "don't" is the negative of the auxiliary "do." If you have to split Japanese text into words and want to be principled about it, treating ません as a separate word is not a bad way to go about it.
But of course there are other ways, so a "fill in the blank" question with two gaps right next to each other is generally a bad idea.
The point is not that you can't cut みません into み and ません. The point is that it should be one single gap in the first place.
It's like cutting gaps out of English sentence like this: I'm [go][ing] to beat the shit out of that guy. Sure we know the logical way to break down 'going' is 'go' and '-ing', but it should be one single gap anyway.
Damn, where did that example come from? :P
+1 this definitely makes sense, since you're gonna have a million verbs ending in "masen", just make it a separate word and understand that it's just part of the conjugation.
I agree, several little issues with Japanese that don't make it currently useful. Cool idea though!
Great stuff!
Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.
Aaa, you saved me, thought it's broken, but you have to drag this thing!
ps. video shouldn't loop as default, it's annoying.
I actually like the default looping. When I’m learning and trying to train my ear, I need to listen to the phrase over and over and it’s helpful to not have to click play again.
You didn’t even read the most basic settings that clearly say “click and drag interface” or something similar. But I still agree, tapping/clicking should work in sequential order eventually (it’s not as easy to implement).
Re, looping; there are controls to turn it off. You aren’t paying attention one bit. If you’re going to say things, at least be diligent in the things you are going to address.
I also don't read all of the terms and conditions, and I feel free to get mad at unreasonable items that I discovered while using the product. Fight me.
FYI: when people say "X is default and it's annoying", it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know how to turn off X.
You don't need to be so combative in this feedback thread for someone's language learning app.
It’s not clear that those controls are for the video on first glance. I thought they referred to the exercise itself (eg, restart exercise).
I think you’re not thinking like a new user.
Will do. I also like the click to place more than dragging & dropping.
This has a ton of potential! Keep going!
Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.
But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.
You can do it!
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
Is it?
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
20 hours a week of intensive instruction.
Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks
This is what it actually takes.
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
[0] https://japanesecomplete.com/kanji-game.html
Very cool; and pretty too!
there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.
> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
True but then I remember that most people are just paying for the feeling. There's millions to be made actually teaching people stuff (learning is hard) but there are billions to be made making people feel like they are.
That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares
> rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo
I disagree that it's an illusion. People are learning a new language when using Duolingo, but 5-10 minutes/day means it will take a long time before they are proficient. Someone else linked to the state department website showing 550-690 hours of learning required on the English adjacent languages.
Thanks! Competing with the giant like Duolingo is hard. But I believe that there is an edge, especially if these transcription models keep improving. I find them quite good already but simple mistakes are very off-putting.
This is great - I've actually started building something similar myself a few months ago.
Requests:
- Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America
- Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)
- Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)
+1 to splitting Spanish. Even better is picking a Spanish speaking country and listening to news from that specific country.
Thanks!
> Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America Will do!
> Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)
I'm working on splitting it up in easy/normal videos. That should be do-able to assess.
> Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)
I'm thinking about creating a browser plugin where you can tick a box to automatically import it into Fluentsubs. Or create an exercise from an existing video. It will take minutes before it is fully transcribed but it can be a nice way to prep your own content without people blaming me that I serve biased content.
I'm not sure though if people are willing to install browser plugins. I'm always a bit weiry with plugins that are invasive on websites like YouTube.
One minor but very nice aspect of the UX is that I was able to click the link and immediately try it out. I wasn't even planning to really use it but ended up completing a round. My only complaint is that the drag and drop is kind of annoying as the default selection process, clicking would feel more natural.
For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.
This is so good! I've been looking for a tool that will simulate the "listen to the Spiderman movie 50x" experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eliB_y0fmSk and this site can do it!
I tried an exercise with Italian, but for some reason one of the words is not in the list to drag and drop ("qualcuno"), so I’m stuck: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1r2cv004m8v1pr775ko...
Edit: also tried in French, and it shows some words in red (I guess that means "invalid" -- please don’t convey information with color only) although they are correct: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1o6d5002s8v1p2h0m2f...
Thank you for trying and the feedback!
I'm working on improving the feedback. It is a bit confusing since some words are very similar so you have no idea what went wrong.
I checked the Italian video. But I don't fully understand: https://imgur.com/a/YcF3dnb . It doesn't pick qualcuno as a filler word. Is it still broken?
Just a quick note – the "Configure Your Exercise" step was a bit confusing. It took me a while to figure out what “Number of Gaps” even meant, since that’s not something I’d usually think about configuring.
Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.
Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.
Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.
Not knowing what "number of gaps" means has no consequence. Just use the app.
If that's true then why include it at all? From a UX perspective you don't want to throw a bunch of configuration options at the user before they even know what the options mean.
It's a hurdle people have to take; and its eating from their 1.5second attention span. Some will get stuck or leave. OP asked for thoughts, this is to help him convert more people.
I just tried the Dutch (my native language) version, and it looks neat, but at some point it asked me to type Emmeloord, which is a small town in the Netherlands. That would be very challenging for someone learning the language without being relatively familiar with the Netherlands, so maybe you can tell the LLM to avoid names?
Hah thanks for the suggestion. I'll make it more strict!
Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.
Thanks! It is available on Desktop immediately after you finish a segment. I'm thinking of bringing it back to mobile. I made it a toggle to save some space on small devices
Just a friendly heads up, for the Japanese exercises the video starts just a bit too late and the word you're listening for is cut off. This might only be pertinent for languages where vocab words are appearing at the beginning of sentences, French and Spanish didn't have "gap words" at their sentence start for the few exercises I tried.
This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.
My biggest complaint about Duolingo is the lack of feedback about how to improve. There are several words whose pronunciations I think I correctly have but the app doesn't understand my pronunciations ever. There are also some words whose dictionary translations aren't provided or are used differently than the translation help offers. Without feedback to ask questions and get answers it's very frustrating.
Really enjoy this method. Please add Irish if you can! TG4 could be used as possible source material: https://www.youtube.com/@TG4TV/videos
Thank you!
I'm using AssemlbyAI and Deepgram for the transcripts at the moment. Unfortunately, they don't support Irish. However, I did see this: https://elevenlabs.io/speech-to-text/irish . Not sure how accurate it is.
The few UX things can make for a really frustrating experience. You don’t want to push away your users in their first testing.
1. Change the word “gaps” to “blanks” for English audiences. It fits the common phrase “fill in the blanks” better. And maybe call it that too.
2. Don’t make the blocks move around for the drag and drop. It makes for a frustratingly slow process to find where the word you were about to grab moved to.
3. Don’t just correct a wrong answer, show what the user chose. I had too many moments where I was convinced the answer was what I had selected. Even using the red/green doesn’t quite make sense if you’ve replaced an incorrect answer with a now correct answer.
3. Consider doing the check after all words have been dropped in so they can read the sentence as a whole. And thus give them the chance to change their word choice.
This looks great! A humble request: a more button that I can press to sign up for an email when a language I seek gets added.
Thank you! I'm trying to push new updates to a sub-reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fluentsubs/ . Simply adding support for manually transcribing videos should be quick to add. However, it also greatly depends on how quick these transcription models get better.
Second this request
Super cool that you've got Dutch as well! I make https://hetnederlands.com, would be happy to do a link exchange or something like that. Feel free to get in touch lars@hetnederlands.com
Would love to see a way to understand the english equivalent of each word. As it stands now you aren't really expanding your vocab if you are just listening and copying what they say without knowing the word's meaning.
You can click on a word after finishing the segment to get a translation.
my immediate feature request. this project is ALMOST there teaching me.
Nice, tried it. Looks cool. On the phone the drag and drop is a bit tricky. Dropped a wrong word and it got score emediatly as wrong, even though I was going to fix it. I expected scoring to happen after I click "submit". But maybe that's the same in Duolingo, no idea.
Thanks for trying. Yes this is on the roadmap. I think it is more intuitive for phones to click, and then hit submit instead of dragging (especially with large fingers hah)
first screen is 'Select a language' - maybe good to make clear if that's your own language, or your target learning language
True, I selected my own language at first
I tried Japanese; the Youtube video that autoplayed had its timing slightly off so that instead of saying あたまも疲れました I only heard まも疲れました. It was pretty confusing but fortunately the answer was displayed right in the video because the video itself had its text spelled out.
https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8v909oq00fj9x1kztl1ez...
I think one other point to consider in the content filtering: One of the first examples that was shown to me had in-video subtitles, which made the exercise too trivial, as the answers were essentially given away.
I absolutely love the idea. I would honestly use this. However, when I tried the English learning, it incorrectly marked words wrong several times. Something to check out.
Thank you! It seems that the video is pretty well transcribed but it unluckily selected segments with a few words missing :/
The words were correct in the YouTube subtitles, both in spelling and sequence. It must have been a problem with the transcription or some other bug (whitespace?)
I love having real sentences -- so much more engaging than the random things made up by Duolingo!
What are your long-term plans with this? I'd love at some point to be able to combine something like this with an algorithm I'm working on called Guided Immersion.
Basically, the system tracks what words you know and don't know, and so could tell you how hard a given sentence is for you. And it also tracks what words it would be useful to review and/or learn (spaced repetition and frequency analysis), to tell you how valuable a sentence would be for you.
The algorithm is generic and can be adapted to any language; right now it's been adapted to Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and New Testament Greek. (Which unfortunately so far doesn't seem to overlap with any of your available languages.) I'm working on an API to allow any content providers to use the algorithm.
Adding this to your system could help focus the content you're showing people to things that they're likely to be able to understand without having to look up most words, and helping them incrementally grow and solidify their vocabulary using the built-in spaced repetition.
Drop me a line if you want to chat at some point -- my email is in my about.
I'd straight up pay 5 or 10 bucks a month for this if it was like... 200% more functional/featured/professional/working. VERY good proof of concept and I love it. Target language is german fwiw.
Thanks for the feedback! It is indeed a PoC that I'm hacking together after work.
I've been working hard to get the quality up. And now that I have some paid users for the large languages I can also auto-transcribe high quality channels. Main reason for the poor exercises (especially for German) was that I initially picked some poor channels and I was being cheap.
I've updated the german channel and that should hopefully result in a better experience.
Really cool idea! I tried a few Spanish ones (I speak Spanish) and unfortunately it was marking things as incorrectly wrong on 2/5 videos I did!
That's a bit unfortunate, sorry about that!
I only checked English, French, Dutch and German and assumed that Spanish would be OK. Was this for drag & drop. And do you maybe have the video? Maybe I need to tune the quality threshold specifically for Spanish videos.
I actually did the same video on desktop and the same answers worked fine! Screenshots of it failing in an android webview, but passing on desktop firefox: https://imgur.com/a/vALlFdH.
Oh wow, I think this is a cross platform bug where I dumbly assumed that strings were equal without normalizing it. I'll fix it! Thanks!
I tried the japanese one, as an A1, I can't read/don't know kanji yet, would be nice to have an option to see katakana/hiragana only, an option to have furigana and an option to see the kanji. Also would like an option to save phrases and not just a word. but likes it overall
Thank you! It should store the word and the sentence so that rehearsal is always with both.
I focussed a lot on European languages at first so the support for the Asian languages is a bit lacking. The only thing I did so far was changing the font and increasing the font size. There is a lot more to do! Thanks!
Hey, this looks really nice and worked like a breeze for French!
Question: out of the processing steps you mention - transcription, quality filtering, segment selection, and (I guess) wrong-word selection) are there any truly manual steps? Those would be the ones that prevent you from building this for just about any language that has good transcription available, right?
There are no manual steps. But it is hard to gatekeep quality. The transcription models work well for the large languages but not so much for the smaller ones.
It looks great - nice work. I tried the french example and found it challenging and useful - a great addition to my duo lingo practice. So much so that I signed up. But in doing so I lost the credits that Id apparently acquired by completing the example which was a little disappointing. I hadnt seen the Easy French videos before - they look nice too.
I am a audio-visual learner and on Duolingo, which I am currently using to learn Spanish, my biggest problem is, that I have not a real visual for the words. Sure sometimes you get a picture for single substantives, but learning via video and watching mouth movements is so much better for me.
So this is a welcome tool I am definitively gonna check out.
This is an amazing concept.
It would be nice to limit the YouTube content a bit like not just news, but an option for news in slow French, or something else. At least for me news in slow French is way easier to understand than news in French at 0.5x in you tube.
Maybe it's just my phone, but the dragging and dropping wasn't hit or miss it was mostly broken. On an English speaking video (my native language) filling in three gaps took me like five video repetitions to get the words in place. It made me feel a lot better about my Spanish speaking performance. Just clicking the words like someone else suggested would solve the problem completely for me, but it might be like a "hit box" problem on the words.
It seems we either ate all your LLM credits or knocked your server over since the spinner just spins (checking dev tools coughs up that https://app.fluentsubs.com/api/exercises/daily?language=fr is 504)
After 4 retries, the spinner finally gave up but it incorrectly said "Sorry, no exercise available for this language today." and not, as it should have, "We were unable to load the exercises. Try again later, or contact support at ${email}"
---
The AppSec-er in me wants to point out that returning the version of nginx that you're using is an antipattern since it enables more targeted attacks if the version has woes; it does it in the error, and it does it in the headers
Thanks for reporting! I'll fix the Nginx version exposure.
Yes, the server got knocked out. I was not expecting this much traffic hah. I already upgraded it but I have an NLP server with 10 language models loaded and it seems to be grinding CPU resources.
As a resident Duolingo apologist this is certainly awesome! I appreciate how little landing-page fluff there was before I could give it a shot. I tried Japanese and felt it was only reasonable in tandem with my in-built translation extension, since Kanji-reading knowledge itself is a major hurdle of learning. Furigana would really help this, but personally, being able to translate the words I pick helps a lot during the challenge of hearing new vocabulary in native Japanese.
As well, I am learning multiple languages, and noticed that the settings panel seems to be the way to switch between them. I think it's a little unnatural to force a user to do this, but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly. The pricing itself seems reasonable and I appreciate that I can feel the app out for free.
Interesting project!
Thank you! And great suggestions!
I focussed first on European languages as I'm learning French. But I'll put some more effort in improving the Japanese experience since it seems to be very popular.
> but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly.
Would a language selection box at the top be enough? Or do you mean a more elaborate way to switch between languages?
For me, the main interest would be to switch the interface for one language to another in ideally 1-2 clicks; so if there was an interface element that captured the languages I was 'working on' that would be neat. Then I'd be happy to peruse the full list whenever curiosity spikes.
Otherwise, great work on a good use of existing technologies to provide meaningful educational benefit for yourself and others!
That's neat ! Although I got an issue on the Finnish challenge, when I drag the (correct) word "koho" it transforms into the (incorrect) word "koko". I thought I missclicked and tried the whole challenge again but I reproduced it despite being very careful.
Thanks for trying, and sorry about that. I thought that the videos for Finnish where on a decent enough level (only checked one). I'm afraid the transcription quality is not on par yet for Finnish. I'll add a warning for the smaller languages and hopefully the models will improve.
Beautiful work. this has massive potential. I like the video aspect - it's almost as how people learned languages back then by listening to CDs and Tape. but now you can read someone's lips
Just did one spanish video, worked really well. The interface is simple enough and easy, great start. It would be great to have a translation appear after completing the words, and maybe a way to save words.
This feels like a great blend of immersion and repetition. Curious if you’re doing any difficulty adaptation based on content complexity or vocabulary frequency?
It's a good idea and something I will be interested in using
However, I was very confused by the interface at first. I started a with a 3 gap exercise. I dragged what I thought was the correct word into the gap. Listened again, changed my mind but I couldn't drag in my new choice. It was a while before I realised that the correct word had been inserted for me. This was despite me not completing the other gaps.
It would be better if the answers weren't given until the user submits the answer.
I placed one word wrong and it didn't tell me what was the correct word, so I learned nothing, I only failed.
Also I'm maybe jlpt4 and the text was too hard, you should let me choose difficulty.
Thanks for trying! Sorry about that. I've changed the daily exercise to an easier one for Japanese. Right now it takes random videos from all levels for the exercises, but I'm working on creating one simple one and a more challenging one.
Great idea! How did you decide on the pricing?
I launched a Japanese Kanji Learning App (KanjiMaster.ai) last month, and I chose a subscription instead of a one-time payment.
Thanks! I decided on it because I think people are fed up with subscription systems and it was easy to implement. However, I made two sales (yay! first time ever) but I paid $20 today to DeepL. I might change it in the future.
I just purchased 6 months of Pro access. Good luck with this project! It has good potential.
Thank you!!
Looks real nice. I'll be using it. If you could map spacebar to pause/unpause the video by default (without focusing on the YouTube window first) that would be great.
The click and drag UX is cool. BUT, it’s super annoying that it reorganizes every time you drag one off. So the next one you may have been looking to drag has now moved (or it means you accidentally grab the incorrect one). Can they stay in their positions? (Eg, replace in place with a greyed out version of the removed word)
Hmm, embedded youtube videos just do not work for me anymore. Maybe because I have too many privacy extensions enabled in firefox. I just get the "sign in to prove you're not a bot" message, and no way to sign in except manually opening youtube and trying to find the same video.
Nice UX.
News is good because it is inherently more interesting than any old video vs having to curate a bunch of interesting videos. It's also good that the videos loop—most tools that have tried to sync videos seem to never autoloop which means you have to keep manually playing it which is annoying.
Some improvements:
Increase the amount of exercise videos for the pro subscription—I only see three and only one new 2min video per day. The format is good enough to be a regular learning tool. I'd rather see a wall of pro-only videos when evaluating whether I went to subscribe. You want to give a sense of immediate value via backlog that the user will unlock since the impulse buy is that I get to immediately do a bunch of exercises because I loved the teaser exercise.
I think the ideal is that I like the demo lesson, I register, I click the exercises list to do another exercise, and I see a bunch of paywalled interesting videos that I'll be able to watch&learn, so I pay right there on the spot after clicking a video that I wanted to listen to.
Exercises:
- Alphabetize the word list so they are easier to find. Takes me forever to find words in this kind of setup, same on Duolingo.
- Allow text input even with the word list visible. The exercise customization option would then just be "Show word bank: boolean".
- Let us click words.
These are some really awesome ideas for UX, thank you!
And I agree. The value from "Pro" should be very clear. What do you think about the one-time payments? Do you think that works or should it be a subscription?
I wonder if this could be used as something like early recaptcha. Have a machine do transcriptions and for the parts where it's not entirely sure just let users play the game and then accept what most users chose as the correct solution. Later on train your automatic transcriber on this.
This is awesome!
My biggest request would be the ability to slow down the videos for those of us who are beginners.
“Gaps” wasn’t clear to me in the settings initially, but is obvious once you start. Maybe clarify it a little?
Otherwise I enjoyed this a lot! Nice work!
Nice work. A similar concept with songs, I guess it was called lyricstraining.com earlier:
https://lingoclip.com/
Any timeline for other languages? Would very much like to see Greek. Alvast bedankt ;)
I liked this a lot. I'm in the process of moving to Italy and am deep in learning Italian. I loved the different speeds and accents from the speakers.
That’s cool. I managed to guess several sentences without even watching videos.
Pretty cool honestly, very nice job. The UX is well made, no distractions, you can consider doing several small sessions during the day to learn during breaks. I love it! I would personally be quite interested in Chinese (in that case, I would strongly recommend putting the accents on latin characters, otherwise users cannot know how to pronounce).
I tried Spanish and Japanese. A tiny recommendation for Japanese: it would be nice to have both kanjis and hiraganas in the same block for the word choices. That way, you can decouple the learning of kanjis from the pure listening.
Great work, really!
This is amazing! Definitely going to use this during my German study!
Great idea. However, the clip I got was spoken so fast that if I was able to actually understand any of it I think I wouldn't be learning Spanish as I'd have already mastered it.
Is there a beginner mode?
you could change the video speed, would be cool if he added a button to do it
Awesome idea! Do you plan to add Portuguese soon? I found it surprising that Dutch is in there before it given there are far fewer speakers. Was this related to the amount of content available?
Thanks! And yes I'll add it soon. I'm Dutch so I could validate the videos.
> Was this related to the amount of content available?
Yes, Portuguese is available in the app, but I only transcribe the Easy Portuguese videos for now so I don't have a lot of content available at the moment.
I checked the Portuguese content available and you should clarify it's Brazilian (and change the flag to the Brazilian one so it doesn't induce in error).
Yes, will do that. Thanks for the suggestion!
This is cool!
I'm curious now: how do you transcribe the videos? And how do you align the transcript with the video (in terms of timing)? Are there libraries doing that?
I'm using AssemblyAI and Deepgram. AssemblyAI for the large languages and Deepgram for the smaller ones.
Have you seen Mauril for English-French training?
https://mauril.ca/en/
Cool idea! I tried French with manual input. How do I move on, there is no button to advance.
Sorry it is a bit hidden. You should press 'enter' on the keyboard.
I am 600 days on Duolingo I tried Spanish, I did not enjoy it. The videos speak Spanish too fast and the words are alien to me.
Don't autoplay in a loop it's very annoying. With that gone, it will be fun. Remove drag and drop.
Apparently I need to sign in to protect the community or s/t
So there was no way to play the video.
Also that blinding flash of white when it starts is unnecessary cruelty
Aj, sorry about that. I think it is YouTube blocking you. I didn't think of that edge case yet so I think my app will keep trying to play the video. Thanks for the report.
could u add euro portuguese please? ive seen many euro portugues language models. ive been meaning to learn but most are brazilian
Suggest to get rid of drag and drop for multi choice or something else. Tried doing on mobile and it’s a bit difficult.
I absolutely love this - one thought, clicking the words should auto drop them into the first open spot.
This is a great idea! Anyway to stop the videos from constantly replaying while filling the gaps?
Looks promising, please let me know if you're able to add Swedish or if that's on a roadmap.
For some reason, probably my corporate firewall, this is blocked by certificate errors for me.
Probably YouTube is blocked by the corporate firewall. Or my whole domain?
Mines' the same. My local firewall blocked the site when the YouTube embbed tried to play, and when I switched to my work VPN it blocked the domain altogether.
Youtube itself is fine. It's not a domain block but "certificate issuer unrecognized". Palo Alto Networks?
This is very good, thank you.
Love the idea! Any chance you could get Mandarin?
Looks cool! Unfortunately, the buttons are unresponsive on Firefox :/
The signup confirmation email has awstrack.me tracking in it :(
Oh I thought I disabled that. Sorry about it. I'll remove it.
i'm loving it! added it to my daily tasks now!
I'm getting "Failed to load video player"
I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo. It has brought me from zero to scoring 96% on this test – I didn’t realise I was so advanced!
I love the concept and the execution. This is a rare instance of a Show HN that I not just admire, but can easily see myself using regularly and paying for.
Please, please monetise this in such a way as to avoid enshittification.
Thank you! Right now it is not costing me a lot of money. So hopefully if I provide enough value and a decent price it can be a sustainable project!
Initial reactions.
1) Let us keep the right sidebar permanently out, and DON'T grey out the rest of the screen. I want to be able to click on target language words and immediately see them. Like, you've given us the translated sentence, but I can't see which word is which;
2) Colour _the same words_ in both languages when doing mouseover;
3) Or just highlight BOTH as we're listening [but note issue below!];
4) Make the keyboard use a bit more intuitive - i.e. left/right obviously means "go back or forward in the video/audio", but now I have to CLICK on the yt video again to get that behavior. It should be auto so I don't have to do that. Similarly, I want to click on a word to know it's meaning, but then go back to space->pause behavior. Rn clicking a word breaks that. Just adds friction to users.
5) Consider yt-dlp to save the videos so if we are studying one, and yt pulls it, we can keep using. Maybe for the roadmap.
6) Consider allowing us to add words to vocab -- and which vocab -- directly from mouseover [without clogging up UI - not sure there]. Right now it's a bit convoluted [right sidebar, which again should be permanent and integrated, not greying out the main screen - but even if that was fixed, that's a lot of mouse movement]
6) Handle idiomatic language issues better. You'll probably need another LLM pass/method for this, but IT'S a BIG ONE! Languages don't map 1:1 obviously, so for example this one:
https://app.fluentsubs.com/stream?v=cm8mnqrqe084ervb0mi6a4sa...
"genommen" was translated as "taken" <- means nothing.
I dump into 4o and it explains
In the phrase „genau genommen“, the word „genommen“ is part of a fixed idiomatic expression and doesn't translate literally as "taken."
„Genau genommen“ means "strictly speaking" or "to be precise."
So the full sentence:
„Wir sind heute wieder auf der Straße unterwegs, genau genommen auf dem Flohmarkt…“
translates to:
"Today we're out on the street again — strictly speaking, at the flea market…"
It’s specifying or narrowing down what “on the street” means in this context.
**
So you'll need to pull out these idiomatic phrases and then make sure they can be analysed as a single unit, so to speak. Learners are gonna have to be acquainted with those, and now the workflow is obviously broken.
Basically just get a model to bundle them and then in the sidebar on the right that has like "drill into X" you've got the PHRASE as a unit of analysis.
Thanks for all the feedback! Really appreciated!
1. Makes sense! 2./3. That's a bit hard, but like point 6 I think it is possible to map certain parts. 4. Makes sense 5. I put it on the roadmap but I think it is not so much of a priority now. I want to have an offline mode at a certain point (as well as a dedicated app) 6. Yes, this is hard and expensive. But I think that I should have a high quality section with proper quality control. I have some ideas to quickly create lessons as a teacher, but right now I'm mainly firefighting stability and quality
Thanks again for the extensive write-up
For 2/3 — isn’t it just another api call to get the mappings [solving 6 as a side effect] then somehow wiring it up to the frontend like you already do?
The sidebar greying out the foreground now and not able to stay locked REALLY breaks flow. Fixing that slightly mitigates.
It’s amazing tho and I’ll subscribe soon enough.
This is nice!
It's a shame the news is so depressing.
Is this in some way related to youglish?
This is a great idea. Nice job!
Amazing, this is really awesome
love it! Just wanted to share my support.
I tried the japanese version. I like that you are using real Japanese language YouTube videos. You can see the kanji on the videos though so it kind of defeated the point. Hide the video? Great idea though and very fun too.
Thanks for trying! You can hide the video by clicking the video button.
I tried the Polish and it told me sorry, no news today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Did you hand-pick the videos? My first one was some Elon Musk conspiracy dumpster and the second one some church “morality” thing… I think it’s a good example of what not to do with LLMs.
Also, your page needs to disclose any content filtered by or generated by a model.
No I let the LLM filter on "non-war and non-politics" but I don't have a ton of content available (yet) so it might picked something that was not great. Which language did you try?
The English icon has the Union Jack flag rather than the US flag, so it automatically elevates the service above Duolingo for me.
English (Traditional) vs English (Simplified)
That meme is such a load of hogwash. In many ways, US English is closer to "traditional" than UK English. They've both diverged somewhat from what they were in the 17th century. Neither form has been "simplified" in any way.
As for the Union Jack: the UK has at least 3 rather different languages (English, Gaelic, Welsh), possibly a few more depending on how you count the different kinds of Gaelic.
Using a country flag to represent a language has always struck me as being silly. Only rarely do they map 1-to-1.
It's entirely a joke based on the two different versions of "Chinese" offered on most websites, it's not really meant to be taken seriously. But I've heard that there's an island in New England somewhere whose local accent is closest to Elizabethan English.
Tangier Island off of Virginia, in the Chesapeake:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-isla...
Also, for what it's worth:
> Some people have characterised Tangier’s way of speaking as ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Restoration’ English, but that’s nonsense. Languages aren’t static and the Tangier dialect has changed a lot because of its isolation. It’s a distinct creation of its own," Shores said.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Ocracoke, North Carolina[0]
[0]https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...
Yeah, but there is a real difference between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Traditional are more ornamental/complicated while simplified are ... simplified/minimalist .
Honest question, what's the meaning behind this joke? Is it just referencing the fact that American English drops "u" in the spelling of e.g. "color"?
It's primarily a reference to various language selection dropdowns offering "Chinese (Traditional)" (which is used in Taiwan) and "Chinese (Simplified)" (which is used on the Chinese mainland). That difference arises from Mao-era simplification of many of the most common hanzi characters to make them easier to write or distinguish.
Mixed with, yes, the variant spellings and word choices (e.g. chips/crisps/biscuits) that make it apparent to British English readers when something is American.
I think my confusion is more from the implication that variant spellings imply "simplification"—even at a glance, simplified and traditional hanzi differ greatly in complexity, whereas I don't see how "chips" is any simpler than "crisps", even as a joke....
EDIT: Of course, it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things—feel free to ignore my pedantry over a silly joke :-)
This really isn’t a positive point. Flags represent nations, not languages, and it can be quite offensive to equate the two.
To use your example, there are plenty of Irish people who speak English but would resent being forced to identify with the Union Flag.
For another example that is very relevant today, there are plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who hate Russia. Using the Russian flag to represent them would at best be distasteful.
That's actually a really good point that seems obvious, but I hadn't considered before. I wonder what a better solution is. ISO language codes[1], I guess?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_language_codes
That’s the problem with conflating nations and language.
For example, the very first English video I got was a South African English accent.
It works to a first approximation.
Of the five languages I have configured in KDE, three of them are country-specific. So I use the flag indicator, which is far quicker for me to locate and identify out of the corner of my eye than would be a text label (which would require using the retina and thus more time and attention).
Sure, fine for personal uses. I mean broadly and generally.
As for English, the United States has far and away the largest number of native English speakers.
Not that I think the stars and stripes has any more right to represent “English” as a concept any more than the Union Jack. If you’re going on origin, why not the flag of England instead?
I mostly meant that facetiously as now we're entering the linguistic quagmire of trying to pin down an exact origin for a language, and furthermore (depending on your chosen definition of "English") the language itself predates the current flag of England, so even that is open to debate regarding its appropriateness.
The moral is: don't try to draw boxes around languages.
All that said, I do understand why someone would want to use flags as shorthand for language. It's wrong, but it's useful.
Rather ironic, considering that it’s a flag to indicate personal union of ownership of subjects and lands by the Scottish king who inherited the subjects and lands of England, but you prefer it to be the icon for the language of the state of England, a country in which its own language is more or less indecipherable in many places due to accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.
You would be far more likely to understand any given English speaking person in the USA than in England. It should really be called American at this point.
> accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization. There are just as many accents and dialects of English in the Americas as there are in Britain. Even your term "creolization" comes from Louisiana. It's a matter of perspective and something that all language learners will have the face, the difference between 'standard' English/Spanish/German and regional variations both within it's originating country and from abroad.
Will give it a shot if you add Mandarin/simplified or swahili.
Clearly I’m in the minority, but I found the idea awful. The execution on the exercises is good—I especially like that you mix similarly sounding words—but my first thought as soon as I read your description was that the news are a terrible, worrying choice which could be misused to push a specific agenda on learners. Lo and behold, first thing I try is Musk’s dad calling people bums. Learners shouldn’t be subjected to polarised opinions at the same time they are trying to internalise words. Use instead some neutral science channels like Veritasium, CGP Grey, or Vsauce.
I agree that channels should be checked more carefully. I initially added two news channels per language. But some of those are pretty horrible (like Skynews). I'll put some more time in adjusting the channels. For example, TF1 is really great for French. It can be colored but it has many non-political or more local items.
I picked news channels because they often have short well spoken videos.
This is probably better even if you just select non-US news channels showing non-US news items. NHK 24 kind of thing.