4 ms·
Ask HN: Why are there no closed captions for the “vocabulary impaired”?
Such a feature would automatically show you the definitions of difficult words that you may not know.
That way, you don't even need to pause your movie/TV show to look up the meaning of a word.
Wouldn't that improve vocabulary significantly and be relatively easy to implement?
- Piskvorrr 11y agoNot sure what exactly you mean. Do you mean subtitles like this? (with apologies to George Lucas and thanks to http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ ) It is a time of people's war. Space ships of people who do not agree, hitting from a hidden home, have won their first win against the bad Many-Star-Group Big-Country. During the fight, people who steal hidden information for people who do not agree managed to steal hidden plans to the Big-Country's greatest attack thing, the DEATH STAR, a hard-metal covered space house with enough power to put away an entire large space home ball. In such case, it would probably be better to see both the simplified and original subtitles, no?
- 27182818284 11y agoIt isn't a pain point for most people. In addition to that, for some people like myself, it is the opposite of a pain point as I don't mind learning new words by looking them up.
- amichail 11y agoWhat's wrong with learning new words WITHOUT looking them up?
- Piskvorrr 11y agoIt does sound as an interesting experiment. I wonder if there's a thesaurus mapping English to (a) simple English...although I can imagine that output of such experiment would not be exactly fluent. I'm not sure that I'd be able to keep up with all the state - 1.story, 2.visual, 3.spoken word, 4.simplified subtitles and their map to 3 (even "normal" subtitles are pretty distracting). edit: Let me abuse another classic for an example - something like that (emphasized words would be the subtitles)? "All ancient land name is split into three parts, one of which the tribe name live, the tribe name another, those who in their own language are called tribe name, in ours tribe name, the third. All these differ from each other in language, what they do and laws. The river Garonne splits the Gauls from the Aquitani; the Marne and the Seine split them from the Belgae. Of all these, the Belgae are the most brave, because they are most far from the Roman cities and development of [our] part of the world, and sellers not often go to them and bring those things which tend to make weak the mind; and they are the closest to the tribe name, who live beyond the Rhine, with whom they are all the time making war; for which reason the tribe name also are better than the rest of the Gauls in being brave, as they fight with the Germans in almost daily fights, when they either chase away them from their own lands, or themselves attack on their borders.
- amichail 11y agoInstead of simplified subtitles, you would just see the definition of a rare word that was just said.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoHow do you know what is and is not a rare word.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoLanguage corpus: feed a large collection of texts into database, sort by word frequency. The lower the frequency, the rarer the word.