[HN Gopher] Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-worl...
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Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like
the news
I've been working on a little side project that combines Duolingo-
like listening comprehension exercises with real content . Every
video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed
captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a
LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems
to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough
for these short exercises. Would love your thoughts!
Author : ph4evers
Score : 405 points
Date : 2025-04-01 05:46 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (app.fluentsubs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (app.fluentsubs.com)
| dvh wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| philipjoubert wrote:
| 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)
| nbcesar wrote:
| +1 to splitting Spanish. Even better is picking a Spanish
| speaking country and listening to news from that specific
| country.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| nougati wrote:
| 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!
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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?
| nougati wrote:
| 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!
| vincvinc wrote:
| first screen is 'Select a language' - maybe good to make clear if
| that's your own language, or your target learning language
| logoji wrote:
| True, I selected my own language at first
| anotherpaul wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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)
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 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
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| That's cool. I managed to guess several sentences without even
| watching videos.
| mattsouth wrote:
| 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.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| 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!
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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!
| JimmyBuckets wrote:
| 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?
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| rlf_dev wrote:
| 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).
| ph4evers wrote:
| Yes, will do that. Thanks for the suggestion!
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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?
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| Vinnl wrote:
| 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?
| ph4evers wrote:
| Hah thanks for the suggestion. I'll make it more strict!
| burningFish wrote:
| 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!
| JackYoustra wrote:
| 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.
| polymatter wrote:
| Second this request
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| For some reason, probably my corporate firewall, this is blocked
| by certificate errors for me.
| ph4evers wrote:
| Probably YouTube is blocked by the corporate firewall. Or my
| whole domain?
| Aromasin wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Youtube itself is fine. It's not a domain block but
| "certificate issuer unrecognized". Palo Alto Networks?
| anon1094 wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| Thanks for trying! You can hide the video by clicking the video
| button.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| 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.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| The English icon has the Union Jack flag rather than the US flag,
| so it automatically elevates the service above Duolingo for me.
| nkrisc wrote:
| That's the problem with conflating nations and language.
|
| For example, the very first English video I got was a South
| African English accent.
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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).
| pjc50 wrote:
| English (Traditional) vs English (Simplified)
| elric wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| npongratz wrote:
| 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.
| csh0 wrote:
| Perhaps you're thinking of Ocracoke, North Carolina[0]
|
| [0]https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-
| island-th...
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, but there is a real difference between simplified
| and traditional Chinese characters. Traditional are more
| ornamental/complicated while simplified are ...
| simplified/minimalist .
| BalinKing wrote:
| 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"?
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| BalinKing wrote:
| 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 :-)
| hoseyor wrote:
| 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.
| mavus wrote:
| > 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| 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
| facile3232 wrote:
| Will give it a shot if you add Mandarin/simplified or swahili.
| CWIZO wrote:
| 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?
| dionian wrote:
| you could change the video speed, would be cool if he added a
| button to do it
| kstenerud wrote:
| Looks cool! Unfortunately, the buttons are unresponsive on
| Firefox :/
| Caduceus1 wrote:
| Any timeline for other languages? Would very much like to see
| Greek. Alvast bedankt ;)
| hobofan wrote:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| tom1337 wrote:
| 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.
| hrydgard wrote:
| 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.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 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.
| hoseyor wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You don't need to be so combative in this feedback thread
| for someone's language learning app.
| ketralnis wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| Will do. I also like the click to place more than dragging &
| dropping.
| a_c wrote:
| I'm getting "Failed to load video player"
| ed_db wrote:
| Looks promising, please let me know if you're able to add Swedish
| or if that's on a roadmap.
| dicytea wrote:
| 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. [mi][masen]), 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.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| It's a bit like segmenting "don't see" into "don't" and
| "see." masen is the negative of the auxiliary masu 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 masen 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.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| +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.
| raincole wrote:
| The point is not that you can't cut mimasen into mi and
| masen. 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.
| oregoncurtis wrote:
| I agree, several little issues with Japanese that don't make it
| currently useful. Cool idea though!
| Miraltar wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| sharperguy wrote:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| madduci wrote:
| Amazing, this is really awesome
| hk__2 wrote:
| 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...
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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?
| stuaxo wrote:
| It's a shame the news is so depressing.
| N-Krause wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is probably better even if you just select non-US news
| channels showing non-US news items. NHK 24 kind of thing.
| nathell wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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!
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| 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.
| scrollop wrote:
| This is very good, thank you.
| joo2024 wrote:
| could u add euro portuguese please? ive seen many euro portugues
| language models. ive been meaning to learn but most are brazilian
| IdontKnowRust wrote:
| Is this in some way related to youglish?
| kmos17 wrote:
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| 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.
| tifik wrote:
| The signup confirmation email has awstrack.me tracking in it :(
| ph4evers wrote:
| Oh I thought I disabled that. Sorry about it. I'll remove it.
| tom2948329494 wrote:
| 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.
| slab_city wrote:
| Not knowing what "number of gaps" means has no consequence.
| Just use the app.
| setsewerd wrote:
| 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.
| tom2948329494 wrote:
| 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.
| Timpy wrote:
| 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.
| dionian wrote:
| I absolutely love this - one thought, clicking the words should
| auto drop them into the first open spot.
| iambateman wrote:
| 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!
| beardedwizard wrote:
| 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.
| alchemyzach wrote:
| 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
| mlsu wrote:
| 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.
| jpcom wrote:
| 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
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| mrwww wrote:
| 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
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| This is amazing! Definitely going to use this during my German
| study!
| axpy906 wrote:
| Suggest to get rid of drag and drop for multi choice or something
| else. Tried doing on mobile and it's a bit difficult.
| _qua wrote:
| This is a great idea. Nice job!
| palata wrote:
| 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?
| ph4evers wrote:
| I'm using AssemblyAI and Deepgram. AssemblyAI for the large
| languages and Deepgram for the smaller ones.
| IntStorage wrote:
| This is a great idea! Anyway to stop the videos from constantly
| replaying while filling the gaps?
| dzonga wrote:
| 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
| adilmoujahid wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| adilmoujahid wrote:
| I just purchased 6 months of Pro access. Good luck with this
| project! It has good potential.
| pajop wrote:
| 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!
| mdaniel wrote:
| 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
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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?
| MichaelGlass wrote:
| love it! Just wanted to share my support.
| xattt wrote:
| Have you seen Mauril for English-French training?
|
| https://mauril.ca/en/
| owenpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| Thank you! It seems that the video is pretty well transcribed
| but it unluckily selected segments with a few words missing :/
| annienar wrote:
| 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
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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!
| sergiosgc wrote:
| 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.
| ph4evers wrote:
| 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
| initialg wrote:
| i'm loving it! added it to my daily tasks now!
| slumberlust wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| my immediate feature request. this project is ALMOST there
| teaching me.
| skynetv2 wrote:
| 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.
| littlekey wrote:
| I tried the Polish and it told me sorry, no news today.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| 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!
| sharmasachin98 wrote:
| 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?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I tried Japanese; the Youtube video that autoplayed had its
| timing slightly off so that instead of saying atamamoPi remashita
| I only heard mamoPi remashita. 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...
| whycome wrote:
| 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)
| whycome wrote:
| 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.
| timeinput wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| stephankoelle wrote:
| Don't autoplay in a loop it's very annoying. With that gone, it
| will be fun. Remove drag and drop.
| gokhan wrote:
| Nice work. A similar concept with songs, I guess it was called
| lyricstraining.com earlier:
|
| https://lingoclip.com/
| preciousoo wrote:
| This is nice!
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