I do this process by downloading subtitles automatically with http://subdownloader.net/ or manually from http://www.opensubtitles.org/en and then play the tv series directly on the tv.
It's of course less advanced than this (but more easy/enjoyable). I think this approach could be good at the beginning of the learning process (i.e. I've just begun studyin' French and it's too difficult for me to watch a movie with french subtitles only)
EDIT: it's a pity it's Windows-only (Mac in the future) I'd like a Linux version or better a XBMC plugin :)
Now there is! Seriously, although there are alternatives that do part of what your player does on Windows/Mac, there is nothing of the sort on Linux. Definitely make it cross-platform.
Yeah, I'd pay for something like this (for Linux) for learning Spanish. I learnt English by watching TV, and it's pretty much one of the best ways to learn a language.
A small problem is that you'd have to find enough good Spanish (as in Spain) shows/movies, but I guess there's no dearth of those.
Brilliant! This is exactly how a lot of us exposed to US and UK culture since a young age learned English.
Although I've noticed that as I age, I have far less patience to watch television in an unknown language than I used to. Tried learning German this way and it was just annoying.
Quite the coincidence...the comment I wrote actually had another part but I deleted it because I didn't want to appear as someone giving out advice that nobody requested.
Basically what it said is that if you want your kids to learn a foreign language you should put them in front of the TV at a young age because once they are a bit older and actually know that they have a choice they won't want to spend a lot of time looking at a screen where characters are going on about something that they can't understand. As you said it is "just annoying.
So if you want to do this for your kids you basically need to do it when they're clueless to the fact that they can actually change the channel. Once they know they have a choice and are actually bothered by not understanding the language they will surely change to an English channel, one that they can actually understand.
We're focusing on English right now in an effort to stay as lean as possible. There are 2bn English learners on the planet, so from a rational point of view it doesn't really make sense to us to expand to other languages just yet...
I am also looking forward to have the ability to learn more languages than english especially since a part of the fleex team is most like french speaking.
I have coded a python app in my spare time to auto-sync two subtitles streams (any langage) and maximize the time each dual-subtitle is displayed on screen. It just tries to merge two srt as smartly as possible.
I'm interested for feedbacks and test cases, my mail in my profile.
But sometimes, doubling amount text on screen is just not processable at a glance, fleex seems to have very appealing solutions to that : picking one of the langage based on difficulty, arrow key to get back in time and slow down playrate. Cant' wait to play with it!
- some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India)
- some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country)
- you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wrong. (is Cantonese, Tibetan and Mongolian the same language as Mandarin? You realise they are not mutually intelligible and come from different language families?)
I suggest you write the language name in the language itself. If you desperately need something short use the Unicode language codes.
Even better - Europe is effectively comprised of multiple (rather smooth) dialect continua, with national states pretending to have distinct languages, while the actual language situation is much more blurry.
Pardon if this is a dumb question, but what is it that people mean on HN when they say "This." ?? I've seen it a few times now and I still don't understand.
The flags are something that have been used by sites for years, a lot of people are used to it. I speak English but am Canadian, I know to look for the Union Jack if I want English and the French flag for France. Perhaps it's not as simple in other places, but I really don't think it's a big issue. A lot of people can figure it out with a very minimal level of thought/remembering prior experiences. The Union Jack for instance could represent Gaelic, Welsh or Cornish, but most people know it means English. To me, I rather liked seeing the flags, I thought it was a nice touch and added to the look and feel (rather than writing out the language name in subtitle font).
I'm sorry, I don't see how I'm disagreeing with an awesome Show HN. I was trying to provide feedback to improve UX. I like this, I want it to succeed, I personally know English teachers who can recommend it to their students.
> "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences" from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese).
Fluent and literate Cantonese are not automatically fluent and literate in Mandarin. In the same way fluent and native English speakers are not automatically fluent and literate in German, despite using the same alphabet and sharing some vocabulary and grammar.
Very cool. When I was in Japan I met a man who had taught himself English mostly from watching movies and tv shows. His proficiency not only exceeded that of my Japanese friends who were studying English in college (although the state of English education in Japan is a whole other story), but he also sounded very natural.
Very nice! Love this! Using the TV to learn another language actually works really well. (I learned English as a kid watching British Fun Factory cartoons in the '80s). Downside is you also learn a lot of 'inside' things. just the other day my collegues looked at me like I was crazy, because I said "they were drinking (our clients) Kool-Aid". Nobody here knew what I was trying to say. Also, when I was with friends in France they told me I talk French like an American. Too much American TV I suppose.
This is awesome.Unfortunately i have been looking for a similar service; which i am willing to pay for, to improve my Spanish. Movies and music is great supplements to learn a language.
You and I are in the same boat. I use Duolingo for now, but I'm looking for more movies/shows in Spanish. If anyone knows any good Spanish (as in Spain) shows, please recommend!
Congrats! Why aren't you charging for this? $9 a download is very reasonable for someone serious about using it, and you'd get some runway to build out and support this product.
I am not a native speaker, and I learned English from movies and TV shows available to me. It is very interesting to see that this idea is being commercialized only now.
It would be really great if options for other languages are available too. I am looking forward to learn French and German. I tried Duo Lingo, but it did not help me much in speech department. From my past experience, it has to be the movies, and TV shows to assimilate the speaking part.
You could also try http://board.tv4user.de/ for german subtitles of many US/UK TV Shows. It's made for german users who understand little english but still want to see shows as soon as they come out (So the site itself is in german, but finding shows shouldn't be hard). The community is pretty great and very fast when a new episode comes out.
This is how I learned english. I watched all the seasons of Friends and stopped at (almost) every lines to translate words I couldn't understand (and make a list).
I also learned chinese this way, and let me tell you it is way more time consuming and exhausting since I had to draw every characters I didn't know to get the meaning. A solution like that for non-latin language would be awesome.
Great idea - It seems a lot of people already use TV Shows/Movies to learn English, as did I.
This reminded me when I was re-watching a few of my favorite TV Shows, were the Dub/Sub transitions as following from early to later seasons:
1) German Dub – No Subtitles
2) English Dub – German Subtitles
3) English Dub – English Subtitles
4) English Dub – No Subtitles
Interestingly I moved away from German and to English for most of the media I consume and watching German TV at a friend’s house actually sounds really foreign to me now.
I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it.
There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and repeated everything that was said in order to rebrand himself as a midwesterner after he moved to the US. His English is really good, too.
That is precisely how I have learned English when I moved from Poland to the UK. Friends and other TV shows together with English subtitles is the best way to learn.
I would love to see this provide the ability to learn other languages, for which subtitles might be hard to find.
I learned English by watching Friends as well. However the thick german accent stayed. It's funny to see how many people in this post have learned english by watching Friends.
I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather than the words and meaning.
I am not saying you should do this, but if you want to de-accent, then my sample size of about 7 suggests there is one way to do it.
I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough exposure to it. So if I want to adapt a new accent, it's more a question of imitating it until I do it organically - faking it till I make it.
Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.
Yes, it is so hard. I am learning Hindi and I can't even hear the difference between several of the consonants, making it very difficult to measure how well I'm pronouncing them. My Chicago friends can't hear the difference when I say Kyle and Karl, so can't teach themselves to imitate it. And even if they could, changing pronunciation habits takes a lot of attention to the way you speak, which takes effort, which is basically the definition of hard. Its nice that its easy for you, but you should try thinking of it as a skill you have rather than sound like you think everyone else is just lazy.
I didn't mean to say that everyone else is lazy - I just thought that having a native accent wasn't a priority for most people. People can usually make themselves understood perfectly as long as their accent isn't too deviant, and having an accent has its own charm :)
Different English accents have a massive variety of vowel and consonant sounds, and usually one can find a "difficult" vowel sound in some English accent.
As a counter-example, in my experience Spanish accents have very little vowel sound variation.
Perhaps learning how to mimic accents of people from different regions (Irish, Jordie, Scottish, Alabama, BBC etc etc) of your own mother tongue gives you opportunity to learn how to hear and say different vowels and consonants from another language. Or practice the accent off non-native speakers e.g. a French accent for a Parisian speaking English.
This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.
I had a Danish friend at University and she asked me how good her English was. I told her it was perfect, but she would never be taken for someone British as there was no sense of "place" or "class" with her accent.
You can normally make assumptions about someone's place or class within a few words or phrases in the UK
EG "fillum" for "film" for people from the North East, "supper" instead of "dinner" for middle/upper class people.
But if someone copies that behaviour would they get the same benefits?
Some correlated traits:
* mimicking. A critical skill, which is poorly encouraged as a general skill, and as adults we often have habits or beliefs that interfere with it.
* perseverance and repetition
* exploring/using different ways of learning and working out what are effective means of learning and ignoring invalid common techniques.
* Avoiding book learning and rule based learning.
My belief is: look at how a baby or child manages to do it, try to do what they do, and avoid using any parts of the brain they don't use when learning. Not to say I am fluent in another language, just to say what I see in successful second language speakers, and how I try to begin learning (I mostly lack perseverance and repetition!)
Same here as a french guy. Even worse is that I can usually hide it pretty well (or at least diminish it) until I have to pronounce the letter 'R'. Damn R's...
What would be the equivalent french show for going the other way? I found Braquo on Hulu and started watching/translating/studying it, but realized pretty quickly that most of what they say should not be said in good company.
Try "Un gar une fille", it deals with typical, every day situations so it's good for vocabulary. Unfortunately, it may not be suitable for beginners. The conversations are fast paced and I haven't been able to find any French subtitles for it.
I think it is dependent on which accent you have. In my experience as an american (who has met a lot of foreigners), I have found that germans and the dutch seem to have the least problem with the american accent. (Australians too, for a non-european example). There can be a number of reasons for this to be the case, but this is what I have noticed.
I did, and still do the same thing. I can't even recall how many times I watched friends, entourage or deadwood. (I'm a Kraut, too, by the way).
It helps massively, especially with slang. I want to do the same thing now for spanish.
Edit:
Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.
In Once You're Lucky. Twice You're Good by Sarah Lacy, she humorously recounts Max Levchin learning English from TV:
He’d worked so hard to be perfect—what could he possibly have done wrong? It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.
“Where did you learn English?” the teacher asked.
Max responded: “Watchu talkin’ ‘bout, Mr. Harris?”
Mr. Harris kindly suggested he switch from Different Strokes reruns to the nightly news. Embarrassed but undeterred, Max did, and his near-flawless English steadily improved.
A woman serving in a bread shop in Cataluña thought I was retarded, ...but a native retard -- so that was pretty impressive considering I had only learned Spanish for 6 months.
When I moved to the states at age 15, I came from a very prestigious English language school from my native country. As a result my written English was excellent, but nobody could understand my accent and I could not understand the American (or, more precisely, Californian) accent either.
It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.
It's a sign of our times. Indian English follows more or less the British pattern (colour instead of color etc.). However, recent times have seen a marked shift towards American spellings and pronunciation. I would imagine this is the case in other former British colonies as well.
Oh, I understand why it is, but it doesn't stop me complaining :-)
I'm starting to feel some sympathy with the Academie Francaise [1]. At least the US English <--> British English traffic in terms of idioms isn't all one way [2]
This is what happened organically for me* growing up in a country with a native language that has no international traction, and being over-saturated with American pop-culture.
Personally I would like something similar for Spanish.
It crashed two times when I first tried to use it so I tried another file which didn't have subtitles. When I finally loaded a movie and downloaded my own subtitles that I imported it kept loading and didn't show any subtitles after which I've uninstalled.
Now that's annoying - if you're so inclined, could you maybe reach out to us through our contact page? We'd love to try and understand what's causing the problem.
The player stuff is pretty new for us, so we're still in bug-hunting mode...
Hey! It is great to see good use of our API. (The WordReference translation API, you see the WR translations when you click on a word.) This is the type of application that we created it for.
Any idea if there's similar sites for different languages? I'm learning russian, but audio/video material with english (or finnish) subtitles is hard to find.
Russian here.
AFAIK, there aren't many Russian movies with English subs, although I've seen some, like Russian version of Sherlock Holmes.
At the same time there are loads of (pirated) American and British movies and TV series with both English and Russian audio tracks and subtitles, I could help you find them if you like.
161 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadEDIT: it's a pity it's Windows-only (Mac in the future) I'd like a Linux version or better a XBMC plugin :)
A small problem is that you'd have to find enough good Spanish (as in Spain) shows/movies, but I guess there's no dearth of those.
Although I've noticed that as I age, I have far less patience to watch television in an unknown language than I used to. Tried learning German this way and it was just annoying.
Basically what it said is that if you want your kids to learn a foreign language you should put them in front of the TV at a young age because once they are a bit older and actually know that they have a choice they won't want to spend a lot of time looking at a screen where characters are going on about something that they can't understand. As you said it is "just annoying.
So if you want to do this for your kids you basically need to do it when they're clueless to the fact that they can actually change the channel. Once they know they have a choice and are actually bothered by not understanding the language they will surely change to an English channel, one that they can actually understand.
But sometimes, doubling amount text on screen is just not processable at a glance, fleex seems to have very appealing solutions to that : picking one of the langage based on difficulty, arrow key to get back in time and slow down playrate. Cant' wait to play with it!
(http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-repres...) is a starting point.
Basically
- some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India)
- some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country)
- you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wrong. (is Cantonese, Tibetan and Mongolian the same language as Mandarin? You realise they are not mutually intelligible and come from different language families?)
I suggest you write the language name in the language itself. If you desperately need something short use the Unicode language codes.
Edit: Really like it. Definitely continue.
Chinese and Cantonese are representable by the same written language.
> "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences" from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese).
Fluent and literate Cantonese are not automatically fluent and literate in Mandarin. In the same way fluent and native English speakers are not automatically fluent and literate in German, despite using the same alphabet and sharing some vocabulary and grammar.
It would be really great if options for other languages are available too. I am looking forward to learn French and German. I tried Duo Lingo, but it did not help me much in speech department. From my past experience, it has to be the movies, and TV shows to assimilate the speaking part.
I also learned chinese this way, and let me tell you it is way more time consuming and exhausting since I had to draw every characters I didn't know to get the meaning. A solution like that for non-latin language would be awesome.
This reminded me when I was re-watching a few of my favorite TV Shows, were the Dub/Sub transitions as following from early to later seasons:
1) German Dub – No Subtitles
2) English Dub – German Subtitles
3) English Dub – English Subtitles
4) English Dub – No Subtitles
Interestingly I moved away from German and to English for most of the media I consume and watching German TV at a friend’s house actually sounds really foreign to me now.
There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and repeated everything that was said in order to rebrand himself as a midwesterner after he moved to the US. His English is really good, too.
I would love to see this provide the ability to learn other languages, for which subtitles might be hard to find.
I am not saying you should do this, but if you want to de-accent, then my sample size of about 7 suggests there is one way to do it.
Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.
Perhaps learning how to mimic accents of people from different regions (Irish, Jordie, Scottish, Alabama, BBC etc etc) of your own mother tongue gives you opportunity to learn how to hear and say different vowels and consonants from another language. Or practice the accent off non-native speakers e.g. a French accent for a Parisian speaking English.
This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.
You can normally make assumptions about someone's place or class within a few words or phrases in the UK
EG "fillum" for "film" for people from the North East, "supper" instead of "dinner" for middle/upper class people.
Some correlated traits: * mimicking. A critical skill, which is poorly encouraged as a general skill, and as adults we often have habits or beliefs that interfere with it. * perseverance and repetition * exploring/using different ways of learning and working out what are effective means of learning and ignoring invalid common techniques. * Avoiding book learning and rule based learning.
My belief is: look at how a baby or child manages to do it, try to do what they do, and avoid using any parts of the brain they don't use when learning. Not to say I am fluent in another language, just to say what I see in successful second language speakers, and how I try to begin learning (I mostly lack perseverance and repetition!)
"College. And the Police Academy movies."
Edit: Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.
He’d worked so hard to be perfect—what could he possibly have done wrong? It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.
“Where did you learn English?” the teacher asked.
Max responded: “Watchu talkin’ ‘bout, Mr. Harris?”
Mr. Harris kindly suggested he switch from Different Strokes reruns to the nightly news. Embarrassed but undeterred, Max did, and his near-flawless English steadily improved.
It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.
I'm starting to feel some sympathy with the Academie Francaise [1]. At least the US English <--> British English traffic in terms of idioms isn't all one way [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19929249
Personally I would like something similar for Spanish.
*and with stuff like video games, the Web(!!)...
The player stuff is pretty new for us, so we're still in bug-hunting mode...
Congratulations!
Does it work with DVDs or is it limited to the (usually illegal) video files available online?
The first few seasons of The X-Files and Twin Peaks together with Scorsese movies (in which characters talk a lot) were my choices.)