15 ms·

Language learning with Netflix

324 points by skanderbm 5y ago

eob 5y ago
Paying member here -- I've used it to slowly, sentence by sentence, watch a full season of a Taiwanese workplace drama over the past few months. One of the best parts of LLwN as a way to study is the passive encouragement: you can click on a word to mark it as "known", and then it always shows up green in future subtitles. Pretty soon, entire multi-line subtitles start showing up all green. And for me at least, that provides a huge confidence boost that helps me keep going. Instead of seeing each new subtitle as a challenge ("<Deep breath> here we go..."), you think, "It's all green! I already know everything here! I just have to read it!" And that's made a huge difference in how it feels to study. I wish Kindle had a similar feature for books.
- wibr 5y ago
  What's the name of the Taiwanese workplace drama? For people learning Mandarin I provide some information including word lists for a lot of shows on Netflix here: http://www.jiong3.com/gradedwatching/ http://www.jiong3.com/gradedwatching/
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Fantastic! Thank you for sharing. Do you actually practice them? Or what's your approach to using them? I add vocabulary to Pleco faster than the space repetition shows them so it doesn't seem like an effective way to use them. Also searches don't seem to access stored vocab first so it doesn't actually make searching that much faster either.
    - wibr 5y ago
      It depends. Sometimes I really learn all the words before watching, sometimes I just watch something without any preparation. Adding too many words to Pleco SRS over a short time doesn't work well, you will get overwhelmed with reviews quickly. So if I decide to study the words for a tv show I take some time between the episodes to prepare for the next ones, depending on how many words I have to learn it could be days or weeks. Which searches are you referring to?
  - eob 5y ago
    This is amazing! Thank you for putting it together. The show is called Office Girls. Friend in my Mandarin class recommended it as being fairly simple once you get past some office-related vocabulary. “Rich kid has to pose as poor kid and work his way up from the ground floor of dads business” story.
    - wibr 5y ago
      Thanks! I've actually watched that one a while ago but it's not available on Netflix in my region so couldn't get the subtitles to add it to the list. The version on youtube only has hardsubs, unfortunately.
    - banada1 5y ago
      I'm working on a language app and thinking about focusing on Mandarin. I would love your feedback on the lesson format: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com
  - kerng 5y ago
    Oh wow - this is awesome!
  - pacman2 5y ago
    Great. 1. Where can I get the movies? Many chinese movies are incredibly boring. This one is an exception and I did not see it on the list 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/
  - jimyew 5y ago
    This is great!
- vincvinc 5y ago
  That's interesting. I have been using this plugin for years, but only for passive learning - just to watch things on Netflix with dual subtitles (and to unlock subs in more languages than the Netflix UI would allow). Will take another look at the other functionalities.
- madmads 5y ago
  If you want a similar experience with text, I can recommend Learning with Texts (LWT) if you want a self-hosted experience and you are okay putting in some work to setting things up. Basically you feed it some text and it lets you click on words and define their meaning as well as how well you know the word, from 1-5 + "Known" status. There is also LingQ which is a paid and proprietary service, but it has a ton of content as well as no real setup required. It has an already populated pop-up dictionary and many texts to pick from. LWT was inspired from LingQ if I remember correctly. I've used both and can recommend both depending on what experience you are after, I switched to LWT however to save some money and gain some control. I also happen to prefer the experience using LWT. If you're interested in LingQ, be warned LingQ has a pretty scummy subscription cancellation sequence, requiring you to click through 5+ screens of offers and "are you sure?" pages, as well as them threatening with deleting your account data. My data seems intact after the cancellation though. https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/ https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/ https://www.lingq.com/en/ https://www.lingq.com/en/
zelag 5y ago
Is there a similar application but for movies/tv shows stored locally?
- somedude895 5y ago
  A VLC plugin or somesuch would be nice
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
    That's what I think to myself every time those language learning extensions/apps come up. Sadly the VLC code is not very well documented and the extension guide on the wiki is pretty bare as well. I'm guessing one would have to extend the freetype text renderer but that's a tall order.
  - cehrlich 5y ago
    There's MPV plugins, but they require a lot of setup. Some good web based alternatives were suggested in other replies to the parent.
- katspaugh 5y ago
  You could try my app: https://video.fluentcards.com https://video.fluentcards.com Haven't tested it in a while.
  - creamyhorror 5y ago
    Oh hey it's that fluentcards video HTML! Bit of a blast from the past. Kudos again!
- cehrlich 5y ago
  https://animebook.github.io/ https://animebook.github.io/ never mind the 'anime' in the name, it's just a web video player that supports nearly every format and has good subtitle integration. you'll need a hover/popup dictionary (for example, for Japanese Yomichan is popular) to go with it
kleiba 5y ago
The video shows subtitles in two languages for each spoken sentence. Does this use ASR or the official multilingual subtitles? I found that even monolingually, subtitles can sometimes divert from what is actually spoken on screen. I assume that if just the existing subtitles are used, they are not exact translations from one another either? Also, longer dialogs are often split into two screens - this should be an additional synchronization challenge between the two languages, right?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Afaik it uses the built in subtitles. You can also turn off the second language.
ck_one 5y ago
It says: "connection failure" for me. Anybody else having issues accessing the site?
- greybox 5y ago
  Strange, I've been getting these for lots of different sites this morning, I wonder if this is a cloudflare issue
- jbotz 5y ago
  Getting a 503 now.
  - mrwnmonm 5y ago
    Met too
  - styrmis 5y ago
    The Varnish error is almost identical to that of the Guardian (newspaper) website in the UK—wondering if they're both using CloudFlare and that it's CloudFlare that is having the issue? Edit: Perhaps related to this ongoing Fastly outage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408), https://fastly.com https://fastly.com returns the same kind of Varnish error and Github currently has no assets being served in their web UI.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Getting multiple 503 errors to different sites.
- gansai 5y ago
  There's a related thread for this also --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 Fastly is down, impacting lot of sites
- gansai 5y ago
  now, you can access i guess, since fastly is back
pythonlion 5y ago
suggestion: sometimes it is better to be challenged and not to translate everything. I wish there was a way to only translate some of the world with some dictionary of words you don't want to translate.(you already know them)
- maury91 5y ago
  I'm working on a side project that does exactly that: translate everything except some words. When I will have something ready I will add a comment in this thread
  - yorwba 5y ago
    Unless you're about to finish it today, you should probably post it as a "Show HN", otherwise almost nobody is going to see it.
  - codethief 5y ago
    I really like this idea of leaving gaps every since I came across the videos by ItsNachoTime / DeliberateSpanish. Here is an example: https://youtu.be/7kbACgcnG8M?t=83 https://youtu.be/7kbACgcnG8M?t=83 The idea is basically: Once the fill-in-the-blank text appears, stop the video, try to recall the previous sentence (letting the template help you) and repeat it until you can articulate it fluently – that way, you will improve your vocab but also train your hears, pronunciation and intonation.
  - Aditya_Garg 5y ago
    You can check out my project as well, which does something similar. https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo
- Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  I built something based on that principle. It picks a couple nouns from the subtitles and translates that. Its blanks everything else out. You can still follow the story while passively learning the nouns. https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo
bonoboTP 5y ago
I wonder if this is legal, ie transforming creative works to be language learning tools, and inserting themselves into Netflix like this, and also using the Netflix name in their own name. Not saying it shouldn't be legal, I'm just wondering whether they could get sued by Netflix or the copyright holders and lose.
- martindbp 5y ago
  I'm working on something similar, so I may be biased but I'd say no. It's something that transforms and integrates with the content in your browser to facilitate learning. I think fair use applies because 1. it's for educational purposes 2. it does not diminish or compete with the value of the original copyright owner since the content is not copied to some separate site, and subscriptions/ads still apply (unless of course they also start a language learning business) The name "Netflix" though seems troublesome, I agree.
  - bonoboTP 5y ago
    For-profit education does not get a free pass in fair use. > transforms and integrates with the content in your browser "Integrates with" and "browser" are irrelevant technical details. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure, but for example Grand Theft Auto's publisher shut down efforts in the computer vision industry to use their game as a training data generation engine for self-driving car research. That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended.
    - martindbp 5y ago
      By that logic any Chrome extension that modifies the contents of a copyrighted web page is illegal. Holding up an automatic translation device to translate what is being said on the TV would be illegal etc. There are nuances of course, but I don't think it's a problem here. > That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended. I really don't know much about law, just trying to apply my common sense here. I think the difference in this case is that there is a single customer that _uses_ the extension to modify their experience, not a large corporation using a product (game engine and content) for unlicensed purposes. I could see why Rockstar would potentially want to keep the right to license the engine for these simulation purposes in the future, in which case they'd have to block this kind of use of the game directly.
arkitaip 5y ago
This is a tangent, but has any noticed just how terrible Netflix subtitles can be? Occasionally, when watching with family members, I will enable Swedish subtitles for English movies and sometimes it's as if they have worked on a different material than what the actors on screen are saying. It's bizarre to see this low quality effort in movie after movie, show after show.
- laurieg 5y ago
  I've definitely noticed some pretty bad mistranslations in Netflix subtitles but not worse than general movie subtitles.
- telesilla 5y ago
  They traditionally had trained translators, a friend worked for them. He's since been let go, with no warning about quality being an issue, leaving me to believe they have replaced him with machines or cheaper workers. I also watch with subtitles and notice the decline.
- richrichardsson 5y ago
  I was under the impression that most of the English -> English subtitles are just machine generated. So often the subtitles will be homophonic to what was actually said, a mistake that a human would not have made. And then what's worse is you get [Speaking German] or whatever, so I have to pause, disable the subtitles and rewind, just to be able to see the original subtitle that was included for the vitally important to the plot translation of the foreign language.
- FlyingSaucer 5y ago
  Yes! The subtitles can be completely different than the dubbing in some cases which makes it difficult for me to watch with both. Also, they sometime use a bit odd translations. I saw a Belgian show and they translated smoking a cigarette into smoking a fag. Which I guess is technically correct (based on the cambridge dictionary), just an odd choice for general EU viewership
  - 5y ago
brainless 5y ago
Getting an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" - is this site down because Fastly is down?
- atymic 5y ago
  Yep, that'd be it.
kubb 5y ago
> Immersion doesn't mean you have to pack your bags and move to Europe. Joke's on you, I've lived in Europe my whole life.
- framecowbird 5y ago
  Good news, now you no longer have to!
- bluGill 5y ago
  Too bad my target language isn't spoken in Europe (or my home country)
wodenokoto 5y ago
Apparently they are also hosted using fastly which is down. HN discussion here: https://fastly.com/ https://fastly.com/
Hard_Space 5y ago
What a shame there is only one available Romanian title, since that's the language I'm learning.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Excellent, Is there something similar which pops up a dictionary on screen when a word from the subtitle is clicked? A user on my problem validation platform was asking for such a solution[1]. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-video-language-movie https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-...
hughcrt 5y ago
I used Fleex (https://fleex.tv https://fleex.tv) when I was a teenager. It worked really well. You can use it with Netflix and local files by fetching subtitles from Opensubtitles, which is pretty smart
deanclatworthy 5y ago
I tried using this for a few days. I found it incredibly frustrating, partially because the subtitles in Finnish were so dumbed down from the actual English-language dialogue.
curiousgal 5y ago
It might come as a surprise to some but subtitles on Netflix are covered by a license agreement. Some are available in countries and not in others. So this raises some interesting questions on the legality of it all.
- mikeweiss 5y ago
  As far as I'm aware it only provides subtitles that are available for your market on Netflix. (I.E it uses netflix's subtitles... it doesn't provide it's own.)
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
I should try this out. It's gotta be better than the quiz-by-quiz no-context vocab lessons that Duolingo does.
- banada1 5y ago
  I'm working on a chatbot-style lesson format that gives more context: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com
pferdone 5y ago
As an active learner of the Turkish language this tool is really held back by using Netflix' own subtitles. First of all if you go to their website and u look for Turkish content, it only lists shows created for the Turkish market, yet there's so much more content available with Turkish dubs and subs like Ninjago, Pokemon, Paw Patrol that likely have easier vocabulary, cause it's target at kids. And yet again the subs sometimes hardly match the dubs, which therefore doesn't help with hearing comprehension at all. If anyone can suggest good alternatives to practice hearing comprehension at different levels (even payed ones) I would really appreciate it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sweetheart 5y ago
I run a language learning app (leerly.io) which focuses on teaching language through comprehensible input, which seems to be at least somewhat how LLwN is approaching the problem of language acquisition. For those interested in how to get the most out of language learning tools like LLwN, some tips which are backed up by the field of applied linguistics: - Don't translate! If you do, do so very sparingly. It sounds counter-intuitive, but stopping to translate often will just slow you down. That's because... - The most important thing is just experiencing the language. You need hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to the language to really start to acquire it. Comprehension is inevitable, just optimize for time spent listening/reading. - Avoid speaking. This has shown to actually hinder the process of acquiring a language. Speaking is the natural result of having learned a language. You'll notice when you're ready to start speaking a little because you'll occasionally have thoughts in your target language. Until then, speaking practice is virtually useless. Maybe these will help you, as they've definitely helped me learn Spanish. Buena suerte :) Note: These tips are also only for people who want to learn a language to fluency. If you just want to learn enough to order at a restaurant, that's a different ballgame.
- resonious 5y ago
  I'm curious, do you know of any research (or even just anecdotes) showing that speaking practice is bad? I've heard the claim before but never seen any evidence for it. In my own experience, it feels like speaking helps improve my speaking a lot. Sure it doesn't help me pick up new phrases or grammar at all, but the first time I say something always comes out horrible, before getting progressively better as I say it more. And there's the skill of utilizing a limited vocabulary to communicate complex ideas. That's another thing that I feel has gotten better as I exercise it through speech.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    I'll try to dig up the original study I found months ago, talking about correlation between speaking practice and language acquisition in Japanese students learning English. When controlling for method of study, the researchers noted that students who tended to speak more ended up doing _worse_ on final exams. This could potentially be explained by the tendency for early speakers to way over-focus on correctness, which slows the whole process. In the meantime, this book by Krashen may be of interest! He touches on some of the same ideas, roughly. Notably, around page 100 or so, he starts to define what he would consider his ideal learning environment: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_learning.pdf http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_le...
HDMI_Cable 5y ago
It would be really cool if this worked with Firefox. Anyone know of a compatibility layer which would allow this to work?
kerng 5y ago
I am learning Mandarin and found this super useful when watching shows. The ability to slow down and replay sentences quickly, as well as show Pinying is great! Just the other day I watched a Taiwanese movie called "Classmates minus", which was quite good.
- banada1 5y ago
  I'm working on a language app and thinking about pivoting to focus on Mandarin. I would love your feedback on the lesson format: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com
banada1 5y ago
Tools like this are great because they give you access to in-context example sentences. Textbooks often start with grammar and layer sentences on top. I prefer taking a real conversation and breaking it down. If I can see myself saying that sentence, then its guaranteed to be useful. My project tries to achieve this with a chatbot-style lesson format: chatlesson.com
goda90 5y ago
I met a young woman in Chile who had an amazingly clear accent when speaking English. She learned English from watching American TV and listening to American music. It was way better than any English I heard from teenagers learning it in school.
- handrous 5y ago
  Learning English by watching Friends was so common, AFAIK all over the world, that it achieved cliché status, 10-20 years ago. May not be the case anymore.
shkkmo 5y ago
I used this tool and loved it. It works best when the original content is in your content language so the audio matches the subtitles. LLwN provides a nice catalog to find such content which can be very useful even if you don't use the browser extension (such as watching on platforms that don't have Chrome.) https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html
arthurcolle 5y ago
Are you allowed to use a private company's name like this? Not trying to be annoying, just curious.
- e_proxus 5y ago
  Usually most companies are okay if you have titles or names like “X for Netflix”. Some even explicitly state that they prefer that. It’s also a rule on the Apple App Stores that you can’t have a name like “Netflix X” to avoid confusion.
- silverpepsi 5y ago
  Use a private company's name like saying "a printer cartridge for HP laser" or "Toughshell TM case for iPhone 9"? I'd reckon it's quite hard to sell anything specific if the law prevented you from mentioning the thing your product fits or works with Contrast "Language Learning by Netflix"
pacman2 5y ago
What is the difference to https://www.viki.com/ https://www.viki.com/ ?
fomine3 5y ago
I love this extension. I also love YouTube version of this extension but it's not flawless as like Netflix version because of it relies on machine translation with randomly devided sentence by auto transcribe. Also some videos are never transcribed for unknown reason.
schwartzworld 5y ago
Every time I see a language learning tool posted, I look to see if they have Armenian, a language I have been trying to learn for almost a decade. This one fails the test, but so have all the others.

324 points by skanderbm 5y ago

eob 5y ago

Paying member here -- I've used it to slowly, sentence by sentence, watch a full season of a Taiwanese workplace drama over the past few months. One of the best parts of LLwN as a way to study is the passive encouragement: you can click on a word to mark it as "known", and then it always shows up green in future subtitles. Pretty soon, entire multi-line subtitles start showing up all green. And for me at least, that provides a huge confidence boost that helps me keep going. Instead of seeing each new subtitle as a challenge ("<Deep breath> here we go..."), you think, "It's all green! I already know everything here! I just have to read it!" And that's made a huge difference in how it feels to study. I wish Kindle had a similar feature for books.

wibr 5y ago
What's the name of the Taiwanese workplace drama? For people learning Mandarin I provide some information including word lists for a lot of shows on Netflix here: http://www.jiong3.com/gradedwatching/ http://www.jiong3.com/gradedwatching/
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Fantastic! Thank you for sharing. Do you actually practice them? Or what's your approach to using them? I add vocabulary to Pleco faster than the space repetition shows them so it doesn't seem like an effective way to use them. Also searches don't seem to access stored vocab first so it doesn't actually make searching that much faster either.
  - wibr 5y ago
    It depends. Sometimes I really learn all the words before watching, sometimes I just watch something without any preparation. Adding too many words to Pleco SRS over a short time doesn't work well, you will get overwhelmed with reviews quickly. So if I decide to study the words for a tv show I take some time between the episodes to prepare for the next ones, depending on how many words I have to learn it could be days or weeks. Which searches are you referring to?
- eob 5y ago
  This is amazing! Thank you for putting it together. The show is called Office Girls. Friend in my Mandarin class recommended it as being fairly simple once you get past some office-related vocabulary. “Rich kid has to pose as poor kid and work his way up from the ground floor of dads business” story.
  - wibr 5y ago
    Thanks! I've actually watched that one a while ago but it's not available on Netflix in my region so couldn't get the subtitles to add it to the list. The version on youtube only has hardsubs, unfortunately.
  - banada1 5y ago
    I'm working on a language app and thinking about focusing on Mandarin. I would love your feedback on the lesson format: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com
- kerng 5y ago
  Oh wow - this is awesome!
- pacman2 5y ago
  Great. 1. Where can I get the movies? Many chinese movies are incredibly boring. This one is an exception and I did not see it on the list 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/
- jimyew 5y ago
  This is great!
vincvinc 5y ago
That's interesting. I have been using this plugin for years, but only for passive learning - just to watch things on Netflix with dual subtitles (and to unlock subs in more languages than the Netflix UI would allow). Will take another look at the other functionalities.
madmads 5y ago
If you want a similar experience with text, I can recommend Learning with Texts (LWT) if you want a self-hosted experience and you are okay putting in some work to setting things up. Basically you feed it some text and it lets you click on words and define their meaning as well as how well you know the word, from 1-5 + "Known" status. There is also LingQ which is a paid and proprietary service, but it has a ton of content as well as no real setup required. It has an already populated pop-up dictionary and many texts to pick from. LWT was inspired from LingQ if I remember correctly. I've used both and can recommend both depending on what experience you are after, I switched to LWT however to save some money and gain some control. I also happen to prefer the experience using LWT. If you're interested in LingQ, be warned LingQ has a pretty scummy subscription cancellation sequence, requiring you to click through 5+ screens of offers and "are you sure?" pages, as well as them threatening with deleting your account data. My data seems intact after the cancellation though. https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/ https://learning-with-texts.sourceforge.io/ https://www.lingq.com/en/ https://www.lingq.com/en/

zelag 5y ago

Is there a similar application but for movies/tv shows stored locally?

somedude895 5y ago
A VLC plugin or somesuch would be nice
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
  That's what I think to myself every time those language learning extensions/apps come up. Sadly the VLC code is not very well documented and the extension guide on the wiki is pretty bare as well. I'm guessing one would have to extend the freetype text renderer but that's a tall order.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  There's MPV plugins, but they require a lot of setup. Some good web based alternatives were suggested in other replies to the parent.
katspaugh 5y ago
You could try my app: https://video.fluentcards.com https://video.fluentcards.com Haven't tested it in a while.
- creamyhorror 5y ago
  Oh hey it's that fluentcards video HTML! Bit of a blast from the past. Kudos again!
cehrlich 5y ago
https://animebook.github.io/ https://animebook.github.io/ never mind the 'anime' in the name, it's just a web video player that supports nearly every format and has good subtitle integration. you'll need a hover/popup dictionary (for example, for Japanese Yomichan is popular) to go with it

kleiba 5y ago

The video shows subtitles in two languages for each spoken sentence. Does this use ASR or the official multilingual subtitles? I found that even monolingually, subtitles can sometimes divert from what is actually spoken on screen. I assume that if just the existing subtitles are used, they are not exact translations from one another either? Also, longer dialogs are often split into two screens - this should be an additional synchronization challenge between the two languages, right?

shkkmo 5y ago
Afaik it uses the built in subtitles. You can also turn off the second language.

ck_one 5y ago

It says: "connection failure" for me. Anybody else having issues accessing the site?

greybox 5y ago
Strange, I've been getting these for lots of different sites this morning, I wonder if this is a cloudflare issue
jbotz 5y ago
Getting a 503 now.
- mrwnmonm 5y ago
  Met too
- styrmis 5y ago
  The Varnish error is almost identical to that of the Guardian (newspaper) website in the UK—wondering if they're both using CloudFlare and that it's CloudFlare that is having the issue? Edit: Perhaps related to this ongoing Fastly outage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408), https://fastly.com https://fastly.com returns the same kind of Varnish error and Github currently has no assets being served in their web UI.
dougmwne 5y ago
Getting multiple 503 errors to different sites.
gansai 5y ago
There's a related thread for this also --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432408 Fastly is down, impacting lot of sites
gansai 5y ago
now, you can access i guess, since fastly is back

pythonlion 5y ago

suggestion: sometimes it is better to be challenged and not to translate everything. I wish there was a way to only translate some of the world with some dictionary of words you don't want to translate.(you already know them)

maury91 5y ago
I'm working on a side project that does exactly that: translate everything except some words. When I will have something ready I will add a comment in this thread
- yorwba 5y ago
  Unless you're about to finish it today, you should probably post it as a "Show HN", otherwise almost nobody is going to see it.
- codethief 5y ago
  I really like this idea of leaving gaps every since I came across the videos by ItsNachoTime / DeliberateSpanish. Here is an example: https://youtu.be/7kbACgcnG8M?t=83 https://youtu.be/7kbACgcnG8M?t=83 The idea is basically: Once the fill-in-the-blank text appears, stop the video, try to recall the previous sentence (letting the template help you) and repeat it until you can articulate it fluently – that way, you will improve your vocab but also train your hears, pronunciation and intonation.
- Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  You can check out my project as well, which does something similar. https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo
Aditya_Garg 5y ago
I built something based on that principle. It picks a couple nouns from the subtitles and translates that. Its blanks everything else out. You can still follow the story while passively learning the nouns. https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo https://github.com/sutble/netflixlingo

bonoboTP 5y ago

I wonder if this is legal, ie transforming creative works to be language learning tools, and inserting themselves into Netflix like this, and also using the Netflix name in their own name. Not saying it shouldn't be legal, I'm just wondering whether they could get sued by Netflix or the copyright holders and lose.

martindbp 5y ago
I'm working on something similar, so I may be biased but I'd say no. It's something that transforms and integrates with the content in your browser to facilitate learning. I think fair use applies because 1. it's for educational purposes 2. it does not diminish or compete with the value of the original copyright owner since the content is not copied to some separate site, and subscriptions/ads still apply (unless of course they also start a language learning business) The name "Netflix" though seems troublesome, I agree.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  For-profit education does not get a free pass in fair use. > transforms and integrates with the content in your browser "Integrates with" and "browser" are irrelevant technical details. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure, but for example Grand Theft Auto's publisher shut down efforts in the computer vision industry to use their game as a training data generation engine for self-driving car research. That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended.
  - martindbp 5y ago
    By that logic any Chrome extension that modifies the contents of a copyrighted web page is illegal. Holding up an automatic translation device to translate what is being said on the TV would be illegal etc. There are nuances of course, but I don't think it's a problem here. > That's why I'm also wondering how the law deals with using things you have a license for in different ways, for different purposes than originally intended. I really don't know much about law, just trying to apply my common sense here. I think the difference in this case is that there is a single customer that _uses_ the extension to modify their experience, not a large corporation using a product (game engine and content) for unlicensed purposes. I could see why Rockstar would potentially want to keep the right to license the engine for these simulation purposes in the future, in which case they'd have to block this kind of use of the game directly.

arkitaip 5y ago

This is a tangent, but has any noticed just how terrible Netflix subtitles can be? Occasionally, when watching with family members, I will enable Swedish subtitles for English movies and sometimes it's as if they have worked on a different material than what the actors on screen are saying. It's bizarre to see this low quality effort in movie after movie, show after show.

laurieg 5y ago
I've definitely noticed some pretty bad mistranslations in Netflix subtitles but not worse than general movie subtitles.
telesilla 5y ago
They traditionally had trained translators, a friend worked for them. He's since been let go, with no warning about quality being an issue, leaving me to believe they have replaced him with machines or cheaper workers. I also watch with subtitles and notice the decline.
richrichardsson 5y ago
I was under the impression that most of the English -> English subtitles are just machine generated. So often the subtitles will be homophonic to what was actually said, a mistake that a human would not have made. And then what's worse is you get [Speaking German] or whatever, so I have to pause, disable the subtitles and rewind, just to be able to see the original subtitle that was included for the vitally important to the plot translation of the foreign language.
FlyingSaucer 5y ago
Yes! The subtitles can be completely different than the dubbing in some cases which makes it difficult for me to watch with both. Also, they sometime use a bit odd translations. I saw a Belgian show and they translated smoking a cigarette into smoking a fag. Which I guess is technically correct (based on the cambridge dictionary), just an odd choice for general EU viewership
- 5y ago

brainless 5y ago

Getting an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" - is this site down because Fastly is down?

atymic 5y ago
Yep, that'd be it.

kubb 5y ago

> Immersion doesn't mean you have to pack your bags and move to Europe. Joke's on you, I've lived in Europe my whole life.

framecowbird 5y ago
Good news, now you no longer have to!
bluGill 5y ago
Too bad my target language isn't spoken in Europe (or my home country)

wodenokoto 5y ago

Apparently they are also hosted using fastly which is down. HN discussion here: https://fastly.com/ https://fastly.com/

Hard_Space 5y ago

What a shame there is only one available Romanian title, since that's the language I'm learning.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Excellent, Is there something similar which pops up a dictionary on screen when a word from the subtitle is clicked? A user on my problem validation platform was asking for such a solution[1]. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-video-language-movie https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-...

hughcrt 5y ago

I used Fleex (https://fleex.tv https://fleex.tv) when I was a teenager. It worked really well. You can use it with Netflix and local files by fetching subtitles from Opensubtitles, which is pretty smart

deanclatworthy 5y ago

I tried using this for a few days. I found it incredibly frustrating, partially because the subtitles in Finnish were so dumbed down from the actual English-language dialogue.

curiousgal 5y ago

It might come as a surprise to some but subtitles on Netflix are covered by a license agreement. Some are available in countries and not in others. So this raises some interesting questions on the legality of it all.

mikeweiss 5y ago
As far as I'm aware it only provides subtitles that are available for your market on Netflix. (I.E it uses netflix's subtitles... it doesn't provide it's own.)

eli_gottlieb 5y ago

I should try this out. It's gotta be better than the quiz-by-quiz no-context vocab lessons that Duolingo does.

banada1 5y ago
I'm working on a chatbot-style lesson format that gives more context: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com

pferdone 5y ago

As an active learner of the Turkish language this tool is really held back by using Netflix' own subtitles. First of all if you go to their website and u look for Turkish content, it only lists shows created for the Turkish market, yet there's so much more content available with Turkish dubs and subs like Ninjago, Pokemon, Paw Patrol that likely have easier vocabulary, cause it's target at kids. And yet again the subs sometimes hardly match the dubs, which therefore doesn't help with hearing comprehension at all. If anyone can suggest good alternatives to practice hearing comprehension at different levels (even payed ones) I would really appreciate it.

deleted 5y ago
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sweetheart 5y ago

I run a language learning app (leerly.io) which focuses on teaching language through comprehensible input, which seems to be at least somewhat how LLwN is approaching the problem of language acquisition. For those interested in how to get the most out of language learning tools like LLwN, some tips which are backed up by the field of applied linguistics: - Don't translate! If you do, do so very sparingly. It sounds counter-intuitive, but stopping to translate often will just slow you down. That's because... - The most important thing is just experiencing the language. You need hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to the language to really start to acquire it. Comprehension is inevitable, just optimize for time spent listening/reading. - Avoid speaking. This has shown to actually hinder the process of acquiring a language. Speaking is the natural result of having learned a language. You'll notice when you're ready to start speaking a little because you'll occasionally have thoughts in your target language. Until then, speaking practice is virtually useless. Maybe these will help you, as they've definitely helped me learn Spanish. Buena suerte :) Note: These tips are also only for people who want to learn a language to fluency. If you just want to learn enough to order at a restaurant, that's a different ballgame.

resonious 5y ago
I'm curious, do you know of any research (or even just anecdotes) showing that speaking practice is bad? I've heard the claim before but never seen any evidence for it. In my own experience, it feels like speaking helps improve my speaking a lot. Sure it doesn't help me pick up new phrases or grammar at all, but the first time I say something always comes out horrible, before getting progressively better as I say it more. And there's the skill of utilizing a limited vocabulary to communicate complex ideas. That's another thing that I feel has gotten better as I exercise it through speech.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  I'll try to dig up the original study I found months ago, talking about correlation between speaking practice and language acquisition in Japanese students learning English. When controlling for method of study, the researchers noted that students who tended to speak more ended up doing _worse_ on final exams. This could potentially be explained by the tendency for early speakers to way over-focus on correctness, which slows the whole process. In the meantime, this book by Krashen may be of interest! He touches on some of the same ideas, roughly. Notably, around page 100 or so, he starts to define what he would consider his ideal learning environment: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_learning.pdf http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_le...

HDMI_Cable 5y ago

It would be really cool if this worked with Firefox. Anyone know of a compatibility layer which would allow this to work?

kerng 5y ago

I am learning Mandarin and found this super useful when watching shows. The ability to slow down and replay sentences quickly, as well as show Pinying is great! Just the other day I watched a Taiwanese movie called "Classmates minus", which was quite good.

banada1 5y ago
I'm working on a language app and thinking about pivoting to focus on Mandarin. I would love your feedback on the lesson format: https://chatlesson.com https://chatlesson.com

banada1 5y ago

Tools like this are great because they give you access to in-context example sentences. Textbooks often start with grammar and layer sentences on top. I prefer taking a real conversation and breaking it down. If I can see myself saying that sentence, then its guaranteed to be useful. My project tries to achieve this with a chatbot-style lesson format: chatlesson.com

goda90 5y ago

I met a young woman in Chile who had an amazingly clear accent when speaking English. She learned English from watching American TV and listening to American music. It was way better than any English I heard from teenagers learning it in school.

handrous 5y ago
Learning English by watching Friends was so common, AFAIK all over the world, that it achieved cliché status, 10-20 years ago. May not be the case anymore.

shkkmo 5y ago

I used this tool and loved it. It works best when the original content is in your content language so the audio matches the subtitles. LLwN provides a nice catalog to find such content which can be very useful even if you don't use the browser extension (such as watching on platforms that don't have Chrome.) https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html

arthurcolle 5y ago

Are you allowed to use a private company's name like this? Not trying to be annoying, just curious.

e_proxus 5y ago
Usually most companies are okay if you have titles or names like “X for Netflix”. Some even explicitly state that they prefer that. It’s also a rule on the Apple App Stores that you can’t have a name like “Netflix X” to avoid confusion.
silverpepsi 5y ago
Use a private company's name like saying "a printer cartridge for HP laser" or "Toughshell TM case for iPhone 9"? I'd reckon it's quite hard to sell anything specific if the law prevented you from mentioning the thing your product fits or works with Contrast "Language Learning by Netflix"

pacman2 5y ago

What is the difference to https://www.viki.com/ https://www.viki.com/ ?

fomine3 5y ago

I love this extension. I also love YouTube version of this extension but it's not flawless as like Netflix version because of it relies on machine translation with randomly devided sentence by auto transcribe. Also some videos are never transcribed for unknown reason.

schwartzworld 5y ago

Every time I see a language learning tool posted, I look to see if they have Armenian, a language I have been trying to learn for almost a decade. This one fails the test, but so have all the others.