Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news (app.fluentsubs.com)
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!
188 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadAlso I'm maybe jlpt4 and the text was too hard, you should let me choose difficulty.
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)
> 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.
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!
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?
Otherwise, great work on a good use of existing technologies to provide meaningful educational benefit for yourself and others!
Also, your page needs to disclose any content filtered by or generated by a model.
So there was no way to play the video.
Also that blinding flash of white when it starts is unnecessary cruelty
This is awesome :)
I had to (was able to) slow the videos to 1/2 speed (no tengo muchas parablas dontcha know) but this is much better training than Duolingo
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
For example, the very first English video I got was a South African English accent.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_language_codes
Is there a beginner mode?
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.