[HN Gopher] Language Learning with Netflix
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Language Learning with Netflix
Author : impoppy
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-05-06 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (languagelearningwithnetflix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagelearningwithnetflix.com)
| MehdiHK wrote:
| I recently switched to https://www.trancy.org/
| soegaard wrote:
| Chrome states that the new version of Language Reactor has been
| disabled, because the extenstion can read and change data on all
| amazon sites.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| All I want is star trek the next generation in LATAM spanish.
| Practically know that series by heart
| vignesh_warar wrote:
| Happy to see my favorite extension on HackerNews! I have been
| using this extension to learn French, and it works quite well for
| me.
| yarg wrote:
| I'd love to see video with subtitles in both the source language
| and the target language, with edges between the corresponding
| terms.
|
| (Not perfect of course, translations never are, but for me (at
| least) it would ease understanding.)
| mentos wrote:
| Trying to learn French I exported all the subtitles for an
| episode of a French tv show 'Lupin' and then worked my way
| through reading it first and then watched it but unfortunately
| felt no easier. Probably because reading it once through really
| isn't enough.
|
| Would be fun if there was an entire 10 week course that worked
| up to an episode of real tv that by the time you get to it
| watching is completely fluent.
| watwut wrote:
| What worked for me was to read a scene in advance and then
| watch that scene. Or watch with subtitles and then again
| without them. Whole show is too long.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| For Spanish, _Destinos_ is something like that. It 's a
| reasonably interesting telenovela that starts out with
| beginner-level language and quickly works up to more
| interesting dialogue.
|
| https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-
| to-s...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There a podcast I follow occasionally, the presenter does a
| brief news-style interest story in a random subject. The
| first read through is sometimes incomprehensible (to me) but
| then he breaks down each phrase, and explains them (in French
| mostly). At the end he reads the piece in full again, and
| it's mostly comprehensible ... but that's a 2 minute piece of
| speech. Trying to do that for a whole movie would be way too
| much for me.
|
| Perhaps that would suit you too:
|
| Learn French with daily podcasts
| https://www.chosesasavoir.com
|
| RSS address: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068
|
| I use AntennaPod installed with F-Droid, far and away the
| best podcast player I've found.
|
| (No affiliations or associations, just what I've found
| useful)
| cmehdy wrote:
| You might be interested in RFI's "easy" French news:
| https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-
| fran%C3...
|
| They have articles and audio+transcript news if I remember
| correctly. I'm French myself but I found a lot of good
| opportunities to learn things organically in other
| languages when following the news (in Japanese for me that
| was NHK Easy: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ )
|
| Bon courage pour ton apprentissage!
| leke wrote:
| I think that's called translinear translation. I like the idea,
| but hard to find the content. I never thought to look for film
| though. I wonder if there is a site where you can download
| movie subtitles.
| visarga wrote:
| See my other post
| yarg wrote:
| You'd want something more powerful than subtitles - otherwise
| you get n^2 scaling with the number of languages.
| detrites wrote:
| I think you mean "interlinear" translation. Or aka a "gloss":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss
|
| Particularly, in the Structure section the Taiwanese example.
| impoppy wrote:
| This extension scratches that exact itch -- having audio in
| German and captions both in German and English for example
| visarga wrote:
| I think language study just got an overpowered AI teacher. This
| works more or less for any pair of languages.
|
| I am using GPT4 to reformat text from English to Japanese in easy
| reading mode. It is very good for language study using topics of
| interest.
|
| > Si ha (Watashi wa) [I am] GPT4woShi tsute (GPT4 o tsukatte)
| [using GPT4] Ying Yu kara (Eigo kara) [from English] Ri Ben Yu he
| (Nihongo e) [to Japanese] Jian Dan naDu miWu (Kantan na
| yomimono) [easy reading mode] niBian Huan shimasu. (ni henkan
| shimasu) [to reformat] soreha (Sore wa) [It is] Xing Wei Shen
| itopitsuku (Kyoumi bukai topikku) [interesting topics] woShi
| tsute (o tsukatte) [using] Yan Yu Xue Xi (Gengo gakushuu)
| [language study] nitotemoLiang i (ni totemo yoi) [very good]
| desu. (desu) [is]
|
| Same, but in German:
|
| > Ich benutze (I am using) [ikh benoot-se] GPT4 (GPT4) [ge-pe-te-
| fear] um Text (to reformat text) [oom tekst] aus Englisch (from
| English) [aus engl-ish] zu Japanisch (to Japanese) [tsoo yap-an-
| ish] in einfachem Lesemodus (in easy reading mode) [in ine-fakh-
| em leh-se-moh-dus] umzuformatieren (to reformat) [oom-tsoo-for-
| ma-teer-en]. Es ist sehr (It is very) [es ist zehr] gut fur (good
| for) [goot fuhr] Sprachstudium (language study) [shprakh-shtoo-
| dee-oom] mit interessanten (using interesting) [mit int-er-es-
| sant-en] Themen (topics) [tay-men].
|
| The prompt I used:
|
| Create a Japanese easy reading mode version of the given English,
| breaking it into 2-4 word chunks, providing romaji and English
| translations in brackets for each phrase. This is intended for
| language study purposes.
|
| ~~
|
| Of course this is just a reader prompt, we could also have chat
| mode, asking clarifying questions, asking for more examples of a
| phrase, generate quizzes, etc.
|
| I am at this weird point where I know phonetically much more than
| I can read. This formatting helps a lot because you get to see
| the Kanji first, then you use romaji and English only when
| necessary. Being different scripts helps separate them visually
| so as not to read the romaji before I want to.
| BeretEnjoyer wrote:
| Do you usually use GPT4 to translate from English, or was that
| just for the example in your comment? Because the translated
| output highlights the major problem of this learning-through-AI
| approach: The generated output can just simply be wrong, like
| it is here (both the Japanese and German).
| visarga wrote:
| I think it is good enough to "break into" the text. It's not
| the most literary translation but you could just start from a
| Japanese text if that's what you wanted. I went for modding
| the English text I am currently reading as a language
| exercise.
| zx321 wrote:
| Check out the browser extension Yomichan. It does something
| very similar.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| The Ich -> ikh transliteration is wrong. Of course there are a
| bunch of German photetics which you can't translate into direct
| English transliterations because the sound inventory is
| different.
|
| That being said, GPT is still pretty powerful for language
| learning but you really have to verify more than you trust.
| froh wrote:
| and "ish" would do instead of "ikh", just to also offer the
| solution to the riddle.
| kebsup wrote:
| I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning
| language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog
| don't match, neither for dubbing or original.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I find YouTube to be vastly better for language learning. Good
| subtitles are surprisingly easy to come by, the variety of
| content is much greater, and you can also download the
| transcripts for offline study. And, perhaps even better yet,
| the videos tend to be short. Repetition is super important for
| rapid progress, and it's much easier for me to watch a 10
| minute video two or three times than it is something that's 30
| minutes or longer.
|
| If you're willing to shell out some money, YouTube + LingQ
| (which has a plugin for automatically ripping audio+transcripts
| into lessons) is so effective it's almost like cheating.
| morkalork wrote:
| YouTube appears be using ML SST subtitles most of the time
| and tends to trip over simple things like homonyms and at
| worst throws up its hands and just skips over difficult
| (noisy, cross-talk, etc.) segments. I say this as someone
| taking a 2nd language course where we'll watch a video
| together and do a worksheet and class discussion in that
| language after. Sometimes the instructor's reaction at the
| end will be "wow those subtitles were bad!"
|
| Edit for clarity: the subtitles are in the foreign language,
| not English so it's not an issue of machine translation.
| toxik wrote:
| _[Music]_
| drowsspa wrote:
| Really? Most transcripts and translations I encounter are so
| bad. Do you mean specific videos or channels?
| est31 wrote:
| It still helped me because even though it didn't match 100%, it
| at least gave me an idea of what the original dialog was about.
| Then I could derive the content from it. And it made fun to
| figure out the differences between what was written and what
| was said.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Is that the difference between subtitles and closed captioning?
|
| If I recall, one is made from original script, one is typed up
| from aftually spoken audio.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found
| learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles
| and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original.
|
| 100 000 times this. I don't understand _why_ it 's like that
| but they simply often don't match. And it's not some automated
| translation that went wrong: it's as if the subtitles didn't
| match exactly the final "script". They don't match but the
| subtitles are still totally correct. Sometimes the sentences
| are formulated differently.
|
| It's honestly both a mystery and a gigantic WTF for me. Are
| these only meant for deaf people? And how did they manage to
| get "correct but non-matching" subtitles?
| rocketbop wrote:
| I would assume it's the same as book translations, the point
| isn't to translate it directly but in a way that makes sense
| in the target language. Although maybe a lot of subtitles for
| lesser TV and movies don't have a lot of human input and the
| handler just goes with the softwares suggestion a lot of the
| time.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I always assumed the opposite: the translated subtitles
| reflect exactly what the script says, while the actor may
| have remembered an approximation of the exact line, which is
| normally good enough not to bother with another take.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| They typically hire two different companies to do the
| translations, and the translations are optimized for
| different goals. Subtitles are just meant to be easy to read.
| With dubs they try to make what's being said at least vaguely
| line up with what the actors' lips are doing in an effort to
| avoid the infamous "1970s kung fu movie" effect.
| bombolo wrote:
| The english subtitles for italian shows on netflix are so
| bad. They just mistranslate words or sentences for some
| reason.
| watwut wrote:
| Afaik, they are done by two different teams.
|
| Plus, dubbing is sorta kinda trying to match the length of
| time actors need to say stuff. You cant have sound going
| while actors mouth are not moving at all. Nor the opposite -
| translation is done and actors mouth is still moving. And so
| those movements can not look completely odd. Written
| subtitles has no such limitations, resulting in different
| translation.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Good insight. In this case, why don't they display the
| dubbing text when dubbed audio is playing?
| watwut wrote:
| If I had to guess, it just does not exists in subtitle
| form, no one ever added time information to the
| translation. Otherwise you had it in subtitles options
| with cc.
|
| Some shows have two versions of subtitles available - one
| with cc other without. Likely, majority of consumers are
| not learning language specifically and are just watching
| the show and normal subtitles are superior in that case.
| pferdone wrote:
| Language learning via hearing comprehension of content not
| produced in the target language is almost impossible, because
| the subtitles never match.
|
| However there's s difference between CC (close captions) and
| subtitles, with the former being the verbatim representation
| (including sfx, music etc.) in my experience.
|
| I already commented [0] on this 2 years ago.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27420959#27435311
| phil294 wrote:
| Correct, and you can find CCs more likely on movies and shows
| that were shot in the respective language itself. For
| example, the stuff from
| https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/100396 is much more
| likely to have 100% accurate captions if your goal is to
| learn Spanish
| watwut wrote:
| I found dubbed shows significantly easier to listen then
| native shows. It is actually easier to learn from those then
| from native shows. Dubbing is almost always better pronounced
| and less mixed with background sounds.
|
| Also, the claim that it is impossible to learn if you don't
| have perfect cc subtitle in target language is absurd. You
| can use subtitles in own language to get the meaning.
| nosefrog wrote:
| My friend's startup is similar but for YouTube videos:
| polyglatte.com
| jacooper wrote:
| It supports youtube and other platforms
|
| https://www.languagereactor.com/
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