10 ms·

Language Learning with Netflix

216 points by impoppy 3y ago

throwawaymaths 3y ago
All I want is star trek the next generation in LATAM spanish. Practically know that series by heart
- ajakate 3y ago
  If you have a Roku or Android TV box you should check out Pluto TV. It's a free live TV streaming app. There is a channel on there that is only star trek in Spanish. Personally I've never seen anything on that channel that wasn't TNG
yarg 3y ago
I'd love to see video with subtitles in both the source language and the target language, with edges between the corresponding terms. (Not perfect of course, translations never are, but for me (at least) it would ease understanding.)
- mentos 3y ago
  Trying to learn French I exported all the subtitles for an episode of a French tv show ‘Lupin’ and then worked my way through reading it first and then watched it but unfortunately felt no easier. Probably because reading it once through really isn’t enough. Would be fun if there was an entire 10 week course that worked up to an episode of real tv that by the time you get to it watching is completely fluent.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    There a podcast I follow occasionally, the presenter does a brief news-style interest story in a random subject. The first read through is sometimes incomprehensible (to me) but then he breaks down each phrase, and explains them (in French mostly). At the end he reads the piece in full again, and it's mostly comprehensible ... but that's a 2 minute piece of speech. Trying to do that for a whole movie would be way too much for me. Perhaps that would suit you too: Learn French with daily podcasts https://www.chosesasavoir.com https://www.chosesasavoir.com RSS address: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068 https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068 I use AntennaPod installed with F-Droid, far and away the best podcast player I've found. (No affiliations or associations, just what I've found useful)
    - cmehdy 3y ago
      You might be interested in RFI's "easy" French news: https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-fran%C3%A7ais-facile/ https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-fran%C3... They have articles and audio+transcript news if I remember correctly. I'm French myself but I found a lot of good opportunities to learn things organically in other languages when following the news (in Japanese for me that was NHK Easy: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ ) Bon courage pour ton apprentissage!
    - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
      Just a quick note of thanks for your serendipitous comment - as someone who wants to improve their French, uses Android, likes RSS and wants a non-shit podcast app preferably with free software principles, this has pretty much nailed it
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        C'est formidable!
  - mumblemumble 3y ago
    For Spanish, Destinos is something like that. It's a reasonably interesting telenovela that starts out with beginner-level language and quickly works up to more interesting dialogue. https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-spanish/ https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-s...
  - watwut 3y ago
    What worked for me was to read a scene in advance and then watch that scene. Or watch with subtitles and then again without them. Whole show is too long.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    French is such a nightmare to listen to. Even when I know every word I often still can't make them out. I understand spoken Spanish and German much better despite far less education. I have put a lot of work into French and it's very frustrating.
- leke 3y ago
  I think that's called translinear translation. I like the idea, but hard to find the content. I never thought to look for film though. I wonder if there is a site where you can download movie subtitles.
  - yarg 3y ago
    You'd want something more powerful than subtitles - otherwise you get n^2 scaling with the number of languages.
  - visarga 3y ago
    See my other post
  - detrites 3y ago
    I think you mean "interlinear" translation. Or aka a "gloss": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss Particularly, in the Structure section the Taiwanese example.
- impoppy 3y ago
  This extension scratches that exact itch — having audio in German and captions both in German and English for example
- yarg 3y ago
  This might actually be a useful application for these language bots.
kebsup 3y ago
I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original. 100 000 times this. I don't understand why it's like that but they simply often don't match. And it's not some automated translation that went wrong: it's as if the subtitles didn't match exactly the final "script". They don't match but the subtitles are still totally correct. Sometimes the sentences are formulated differently. It's honestly both a mystery and a gigantic WTF for me. Are these only meant for deaf people? And how did they manage to get "correct but non-matching" subtitles?
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    They translate it idiomatically (which means sometimes completely different sentences) and are constrained by length. The might also start from a voice translation that tries to match the lips.
  - rocketbop 3y ago
    I would assume it’s the same as book translations, the point isn’t to translate it directly but in a way that makes sense in the target language. Although maybe a lot of subtitles for lesser TV and movies don’t have a lot of human input and the handler just goes with the softwares suggestion a lot of the time.
    - Tor3 3y ago
      Exactly. Japanese translations to English almost never match sentence-by-sentence, but then again a direct translation wouldn't be what an English-speaking person would say anyway.
  - d1sxeyes 3y ago
soegaard 3y ago
Chrome states that the new version of Language Reactor has been disabled, because the extenstion can read and change data on all amazon sites.
visarga 3y ago
I think language study just got an overpowered AI teacher. This works more or less for any pair of languages. I am using GPT4 to reformat text from English to Japanese in easy reading mode. It is very good for language study using topics of interest. > 私は (Watashi wa) [I am] GPT4を使って (GPT4 o tsukatte) [using GPT4] 英語から (Eigo kara) [from English] 日本語へ (Nihongo e) [to Japanese] 簡単な読み物 (Kantan na yomimono) [easy reading mode] に変換します。 (ni henkan shimasu) [to reformat] それは (Sore wa) [It is] 興味深いトピック (Kyoumi bukai topikku) [interesting topics] を使って (o tsukatte) [using] 言語学習 (Gengo gakushuu) [language study] にとても良い (ni totemo yoi) [very good] です。 (desu) [is] Same, but in German: > Ich benutze (I am using) [ikh benoot-se] GPT4 (GPT4) [ge-pe-te-fear] um Text (to reformat text) [oom tekst] aus Englisch (from English) [aus engl-ish] zu Japanisch (to Japanese) [tsoo yap-an-ish] in einfachem Lesemodus (in easy reading mode) [in ine-fakh-em leh-se-moh-dus] umzuformatieren (to reformat) [oom-tsoo-for-ma-teer-en]. Es ist sehr (It is very) [es ist zehr] gut für (good for) [goot fuhr] Sprachstudium (language study) [shprakh-shtoo-dee-oom] mit interessanten (using interesting) [mit int-er-es-sant-en] Themen (topics) [tay-men]. The prompt I used: Create a Japanese easy reading mode version of the given English, breaking it into 2-4 word chunks, providing romaji and English translations in brackets for each phrase. This is intended for language study purposes. ~~ Of course this is just a reader prompt, we could also have chat mode, asking clarifying questions, asking for more examples of a phrase, generate quizzes, etc. I am at this weird point where I know phonetically much more than I can read. This formatting helps a lot because you get to see the Kanji first, then you use romaji and English only when necessary. Being different scripts helps separate them visually so as not to read the romaji before I want to.
- BeretEnjoyer 3y ago
  Do you usually use GPT4 to translate from English, or was that just for the example in your comment? Because the translated output highlights the major problem of this learning-through-AI approach: The generated output can just simply be wrong, like it is here (both the Japanese and German).
  - visarga 3y ago
    I think it is good enough to "break into" the text. It's not the most literary translation but you could just start from a Japanese text if that's what you wanted. I went for modding the English text I am currently reading as a language exercise.
nosefrog 3y ago
My friend's startup is similar but for YouTube videos: polyglatte.com
- jacooper 3y ago
  It supports youtube and other platforms https://www.languagereactor.com/ https://www.languagereactor.com/
vignesh_warar 3y ago
Happy to see my favorite extension on HackerNews! I have been using this extension to learn French, and it works quite well for me.
MehdiHK 3y ago
I recently switched to https://www.trancy.org/ https://www.trancy.org/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aix1 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. It looks very cool. May I ask which Trancy tools are you using and how is it going? I just gave it a quick try and wasn't impressed by the current state of things. 1a. The Language Reactor-style plugin. On YouTube, it seems to require that I disable AdBlock on the channels I want to watch. Why is that even a requirement?! I didn't like the idea and gave up. 1b. On Netflix, the first film I tried (Weißbier im Blut) failed with "no machine subtitles" or something to that effect. The show does have subtitles, and LR works, so I am not sure what the problem is. 2. I asked it to proofread a paragraph from "Die Schatzinsel". What I got back was a mix of German, English and gibberish (truncated for brevity): <trancy> At dabei first ru,h Iig always weiter thought ra "uchthete dead. man Der's Kap chestit"än st mustarr bete the ihn same eine large We suitcaseile in the an front, room dann, sch andlug in er my wieder nightmares mit der, Fa I hadust associated auf den this T thought withisch the, one st-leggedarr sailorte. sch Butär by nowfer und, br weach had long schließlich since stopped mit paying einem sche any attentionuß tolichen the, lyrics geme ofinen the Fl songuch, in and die on this W eveningorte aus,: it " wasR onlyuhe new, to Ihr Dr da. dr Livesüayben,." andScore it seemed: to9 make/ no10 good impressionIncorrect on him words because and he phrases: looked None quite annoyedSuggestions before: continuing None his conversationPol withishing the: old- gardener Anfang Taylors about d aachte new rhe ich immerumat,ism.... </trancy>
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Great idea, but I wish this supported Greek. With new LLM tools I wonder if it would be possible to export the subtitles from netflix and then translate to the target language
- insomagent 3y ago
  Not only possible, but likely trivial.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Well it likely depends on how hard it is to actually extract the subtitles from the netflix stream, since I know there's DRM in their videos
- pwpw 3y ago
  I’ve found Language Reactor supports Greek for the limited choices Netflix provided. Also if you haven’t used it, Language Transfer is a phenomenal tool for learning Greek. I’m open to any suggestions you may have!
vanjajaja1 3y ago
also worth saying that this site has a couple of other tools that are cool. my favourite was phrase pump, but I got lazy
habibur 3y ago
Tried it. Didn't really work for me much. Taking a slower approach using Youtube worked better.
55555 3y ago
I only watch Netflix on my Apple TV. How can I use this? Will it work if I Airplay from my MacBook to my TV?
silverpepsi 3y ago
Aside from WorkAudioBook I consider this the greatest language learning tool to exist. I watch Breaking Bad dubbed in Spanish, subs don't match, and paused to try to guess what they were saying every sentence and did tons of look ups. This took 600 hours. Yes about ten hours per episode. By the end I was ready to find a 100% MONOLINGUAL teacher and communicate with her through the whole of every class (incredible feeling btw) to learn things formally. Learning becomes incredibly exciting and productive when you're ready to go full monolingual with it. ((Was I a false beginner? No. I wasn't primed in school, I had about 1 month Spanish in 9th grade before being forcibly expelled from the class with an F. I was definitely racist against the language age 13-17. I found the teacher playing and making us sing Macarena especially distasteful and that was part of what made me hateful.))
- hackernewds 3y ago
  you could literally speak to a human speaker over video chat? there are very affordable services like this
  - silverpepsi 3y ago
    I'm confused, what does video chat have to do with anything? this all took place in Colombia
djtango 3y ago
Anyone got good Mandarin content to recommend? Have a goal to be fluent by 40... Am watching Three Body but the dialogue is sometimes a little tricky to follow. When I think about how I assimilated Japanese from Anime, the reason it's so doable (IMO) is that the language used is reasonably straightforward and they actually talk quite slowly. I found this once you watch movies in Japanese and noticed it was harder to pick out what people were saying.
- insomagent 3y ago
  I live in Taiwan, I've been learning Mandarin for 8 years and use it daily. I kind of can't stand the mainland accent, and I can't understand simplified characters. You may have an easier time finding interesting content if you are learning mainland Chinese. The big problem with Mandarin is that there's a content drought. I ask all my friends here what TV shows, games, YouTubers, movies they recommend. It's kind of hard to find good content in Mandarin. Off the top of my head, though, there are a few really good ones. Here in Taiwan, though, the best stuff is either mixed with Taiwanese (Southern Hokkien) or purely in Taiwanese. That's a bit inaccessible for L2 folks such as myself, but I'm doing the best I can. If you're not interested in Taiwanese content, sorry if these are of no use to you. In no order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_My_Dead_Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_My_Dead_Body https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A4%8D%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E2%80%94%E8%8A%B1%E7%94%B2%E7%94%B7%E5%AD%A9%E8%BD%89%E5%A4%A7%E4%BA%BA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A4%8D%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E2... (Taiwanese heavy, maybe 100% Taiwanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_Love_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_Love_(2021_film) (I think 100% Taiwanese, sorry!) I think the content/culture drought is one of the most difficult factors in learning Chinese, personally. I used to study Japanese very seriously, and there was always a never-ending stream of amazing anime, games, TV shows, music, you name it. I will say, though, if you're into music, the Taiwan indie music scene is world-class. Really good stuff.
  - djtango 3y ago
    I know enough Hokkien and Teochew that Taiwanese won't sound completely alien. I'll add it to the list haha - thanks!
dcsan 3y ago
Love this on the desktop, but it's there a way to use on an ipad - where I watch most movies. Or an app that will show subtitles on an alt lang than the spoken track?
presentation 3y ago
Migaku is a paid service that does this, and then lets you record individual segments into Anki flash cards, and works for a variety of video services. Awesome! https://www.migaku.io/ https://www.migaku.io/
davidzweig 3y ago
Hello. Me and Ognjen made this, the main site is now: https://languagereactor.com/ https://languagereactor.com/ Audio and subs usually don't match for dubbed audio tracks (it's usually ok if you watch a French movie with French subs etc.). I have code that processes the Netflix audio with Whisper ASR, it works very well. Hopefully Netflix don't mind us adding this (my email is in my profile), I think we'll bring this online in a couple of weeks. If any other video provider is interested in having Language Reactor support their site, mail me. Also, we're rolling out a 'virtual conversation partner' starting today: https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/chat-feature-is-here/11942 https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/chat-feature...
- hackernewds 3y ago
  are you planning to migrate the virtual conversation partner to languagereactor.com? Confusing with the "Netflix" part
  - davidzweig 3y ago
    The forum runs on the old domain still, the chatbot is on the new page (languagereactor.com).
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Prompted by this post I tried language reactor and have a few notes: Can you really only sign in with google? I tried the phrase thingy. I don’t get it. It asks me about a word and shows me a sentence and a translation of the sentence. What’s the point here? Shouldn’t the translation be hidden so I have a chance to translate it myself? There’s a lot of buttons I can click and I don’t get what they do. Shouldn’t I just choose “I understood”, “I didn’t understand” and perhaps a “don’t show this one again”? How do I report that a sentence doesn’t have the word that the app suggests I should learn? How do I report typos in sentences?
  - davidzweig 3y ago
    >> Can you really only sign in with google? We've been planning to change auth lib before enabling other login methods, haven't gotten around to it. >> I tried the phrase thingy. I don’t get it. Probably the best info is here, should improve situation: https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/update-learning-stages-flashcards-all-words-panel-phrasepump-api/7991 https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/update-learn... >> How do I report that a sentence doesn’t have the word that the app suggests I should learn? Some words are lemmatised in unexpected ways (el / se are the same lemma). Sometimes the lemmatisation is wrong, despite using sota libs. There's more work to do. >> How do I report typos in sentences? It's not implemented.. I'm not aware of the typo issue. Useful feedback. The project is still a work-in-progress.
deleted 3y ago
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thekogmo 3y ago
also check this out: https://github.com/moismat/netflix-to-md https://github.com/moismat/netflix-to-md
hackernewds 3y ago
But I watch my Netflix primarily on the TV :(
- pwpw 3y ago
  I found you could use a steam deck + dock to output to a TV then use a cheap wireless keyboard such as a Rii to control the setup from your couch. Then you can use the language reactor plugin in chrome to watch Netflix on your tv! You can substitute the steam deck and dock for any pc + hdmi out.
insomagent 3y ago
I tried "Language Reactor" (Chinese) and it was full of errors and only looked up words as one character, which is borderline useless.

216 points by impoppy 3y ago

throwawaymaths 3y ago

All I want is star trek the next generation in LATAM spanish. Practically know that series by heart

ajakate 3y ago
If you have a Roku or Android TV box you should check out Pluto TV. It's a free live TV streaming app. There is a channel on there that is only star trek in Spanish. Personally I've never seen anything on that channel that wasn't TNG

yarg 3y ago

I'd love to see video with subtitles in both the source language and the target language, with edges between the corresponding terms. (Not perfect of course, translations never are, but for me (at least) it would ease understanding.)

mentos 3y ago
Trying to learn French I exported all the subtitles for an episode of a French tv show ‘Lupin’ and then worked my way through reading it first and then watched it but unfortunately felt no easier. Probably because reading it once through really isn’t enough. Would be fun if there was an entire 10 week course that worked up to an episode of real tv that by the time you get to it watching is completely fluent.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  There a podcast I follow occasionally, the presenter does a brief news-style interest story in a random subject. The first read through is sometimes incomprehensible (to me) but then he breaks down each phrase, and explains them (in French mostly). At the end he reads the piece in full again, and it's mostly comprehensible ... but that's a 2 minute piece of speech. Trying to do that for a whole movie would be way too much for me. Perhaps that would suit you too: Learn French with daily podcasts https://www.chosesasavoir.com https://www.chosesasavoir.com RSS address: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068 https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068 I use AntennaPod installed with F-Droid, far and away the best podcast player I've found. (No affiliations or associations, just what I've found useful)
  - cmehdy 3y ago
    You might be interested in RFI's "easy" French news: https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-fran%C3%A7ais-facile/ https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en-fran%C3... They have articles and audio+transcript news if I remember correctly. I'm French myself but I found a lot of good opportunities to learn things organically in other languages when following the news (in Japanese for me that was NHK Easy: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ ) Bon courage pour ton apprentissage!
  - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
    Just a quick note of thanks for your serendipitous comment - as someone who wants to improve their French, uses Android, likes RSS and wants a non-shit podcast app preferably with free software principles, this has pretty much nailed it
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      C'est formidable!
- mumblemumble 3y ago
  For Spanish, Destinos is something like that. It's a reasonably interesting telenovela that starts out with beginner-level language and quickly works up to more interesting dialogue. https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-spanish/ https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-s...
- watwut 3y ago
  What worked for me was to read a scene in advance and then watch that scene. Or watch with subtitles and then again without them. Whole show is too long.
- jfengel 3y ago
  French is such a nightmare to listen to. Even when I know every word I often still can't make them out. I understand spoken Spanish and German much better despite far less education. I have put a lot of work into French and it's very frustrating.
leke 3y ago
I think that's called translinear translation. I like the idea, but hard to find the content. I never thought to look for film though. I wonder if there is a site where you can download movie subtitles.
- yarg 3y ago
  You'd want something more powerful than subtitles - otherwise you get n^2 scaling with the number of languages.
- visarga 3y ago
  See my other post
- detrites 3y ago
  I think you mean "interlinear" translation. Or aka a "gloss": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss Particularly, in the Structure section the Taiwanese example.
impoppy 3y ago
This extension scratches that exact itch — having audio in German and captions both in German and English for example
yarg 3y ago
This might actually be a useful application for these language bots.

kebsup 3y ago

I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original.

TacticalCoder 3y ago
> I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original. 100 000 times this. I don't understand why it's like that but they simply often don't match. And it's not some automated translation that went wrong: it's as if the subtitles didn't match exactly the final "script". They don't match but the subtitles are still totally correct. Sometimes the sentences are formulated differently. It's honestly both a mystery and a gigantic WTF for me. Are these only meant for deaf people? And how did they manage to get "correct but non-matching" subtitles?
- mejutoco 3y ago
  They translate it idiomatically (which means sometimes completely different sentences) and are constrained by length. The might also start from a voice translation that tries to match the lips.
- rocketbop 3y ago
  I would assume it’s the same as book translations, the point isn’t to translate it directly but in a way that makes sense in the target language. Although maybe a lot of subtitles for lesser TV and movies don’t have a lot of human input and the handler just goes with the softwares suggestion a lot of the time.
  - Tor3 3y ago
    Exactly. Japanese translations to English almost never match sentence-by-sentence, but then again a direct translation wouldn't be what an English-speaking person would say anyway.
- d1sxeyes 3y ago

soegaard 3y ago

Chrome states that the new version of Language Reactor has been disabled, because the extenstion can read and change data on all amazon sites.

visarga 3y ago

I think language study just got an overpowered AI teacher. This works more or less for any pair of languages. I am using GPT4 to reformat text from English to Japanese in easy reading mode. It is very good for language study using topics of interest. > 私は (Watashi wa) [I am] GPT4を使って (GPT4 o tsukatte) [using GPT4] 英語から (Eigo kara) [from English] 日本語へ (Nihongo e) [to Japanese] 簡単な読み物 (Kantan na yomimono) [easy reading mode] に変換します。 (ni henkan shimasu) [to reformat] それは (Sore wa) [It is] 興味深いトピック (Kyoumi bukai topikku) [interesting topics] を使って (o tsukatte) [using] 言語学習 (Gengo gakushuu) [language study] にとても良い (ni totemo yoi) [very good] です。 (desu) [is] Same, but in German: > Ich benutze (I am using) [ikh benoot-se] GPT4 (GPT4) [ge-pe-te-fear] um Text (to reformat text) [oom tekst] aus Englisch (from English) [aus engl-ish] zu Japanisch (to Japanese) [tsoo yap-an-ish] in einfachem Lesemodus (in easy reading mode) [in ine-fakh-em leh-se-moh-dus] umzuformatieren (to reformat) [oom-tsoo-for-ma-teer-en]. Es ist sehr (It is very) [es ist zehr] gut für (good for) [goot fuhr] Sprachstudium (language study) [shprakh-shtoo-dee-oom] mit interessanten (using interesting) [mit int-er-es-sant-en] Themen (topics) [tay-men]. The prompt I used: Create a Japanese easy reading mode version of the given English, breaking it into 2-4 word chunks, providing romaji and English translations in brackets for each phrase. This is intended for language study purposes. ~~ Of course this is just a reader prompt, we could also have chat mode, asking clarifying questions, asking for more examples of a phrase, generate quizzes, etc. I am at this weird point where I know phonetically much more than I can read. This formatting helps a lot because you get to see the Kanji first, then you use romaji and English only when necessary. Being different scripts helps separate them visually so as not to read the romaji before I want to.

BeretEnjoyer 3y ago
Do you usually use GPT4 to translate from English, or was that just for the example in your comment? Because the translated output highlights the major problem of this learning-through-AI approach: The generated output can just simply be wrong, like it is here (both the Japanese and German).
- visarga 3y ago
  I think it is good enough to "break into" the text. It's not the most literary translation but you could just start from a Japanese text if that's what you wanted. I went for modding the English text I am currently reading as a language exercise.

nosefrog 3y ago

My friend's startup is similar but for YouTube videos: polyglatte.com

jacooper 3y ago
It supports youtube and other platforms https://www.languagereactor.com/ https://www.languagereactor.com/

vignesh_warar 3y ago

Happy to see my favorite extension on HackerNews! I have been using this extension to learn French, and it works quite well for me.

MehdiHK 3y ago

I recently switched to https://www.trancy.org/ https://www.trancy.org/

deleted 3y ago
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aix1 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. It looks very cool. May I ask which Trancy tools are you using and how is it going? I just gave it a quick try and wasn't impressed by the current state of things. 1a. The Language Reactor-style plugin. On YouTube, it seems to require that I disable AdBlock on the channels I want to watch. Why is that even a requirement?! I didn't like the idea and gave up. 1b. On Netflix, the first film I tried (Weißbier im Blut) failed with "no machine subtitles" or something to that effect. The show does have subtitles, and LR works, so I am not sure what the problem is. 2. I asked it to proofread a paragraph from "Die Schatzinsel". What I got back was a mix of German, English and gibberish (truncated for brevity): <trancy> At dabei first ru,h Iig always weiter thought ra "uchthete dead. man Der's Kap chestit"än st mustarr bete the ihn same eine large We suitcaseile in the an front, room dann, sch andlug in er my wieder nightmares mit der, Fa I hadust associated auf den this T thought withisch the, one st-leggedarr sailorte. sch Butär by nowfer und, br weach had long schließlich since stopped mit paying einem sche any attentionuß tolichen the, lyrics geme ofinen the Fl songuch, in and die on this W eveningorte aus,: it " wasR onlyuhe new, to Ihr Dr da. dr Livesüayben,." andScore it seemed: to9 make/ no10 good impressionIncorrect on him words because and he phrases: looked None quite annoyedSuggestions before: continuing None his conversationPol withishing the: old- gardener Anfang Taylors about d aachte new rhe ich immerumat,ism.... </trancy>

pcthrowaway 3y ago

Great idea, but I wish this supported Greek. With new LLM tools I wonder if it would be possible to export the subtitles from netflix and then translate to the target language

insomagent 3y ago
Not only possible, but likely trivial.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Well it likely depends on how hard it is to actually extract the subtitles from the netflix stream, since I know there's DRM in their videos
pwpw 3y ago
I’ve found Language Reactor supports Greek for the limited choices Netflix provided. Also if you haven’t used it, Language Transfer is a phenomenal tool for learning Greek. I’m open to any suggestions you may have!

vanjajaja1 3y ago

also worth saying that this site has a couple of other tools that are cool. my favourite was phrase pump, but I got lazy

habibur 3y ago

Tried it. Didn't really work for me much. Taking a slower approach using Youtube worked better.

55555 3y ago

I only watch Netflix on my Apple TV. How can I use this? Will it work if I Airplay from my MacBook to my TV?

silverpepsi 3y ago

Aside from WorkAudioBook I consider this the greatest language learning tool to exist. I watch Breaking Bad dubbed in Spanish, subs don't match, and paused to try to guess what they were saying every sentence and did tons of look ups. This took 600 hours. Yes about ten hours per episode. By the end I was ready to find a 100% MONOLINGUAL teacher and communicate with her through the whole of every class (incredible feeling btw) to learn things formally. Learning becomes incredibly exciting and productive when you're ready to go full monolingual with it. ((Was I a false beginner? No. I wasn't primed in school, I had about 1 month Spanish in 9th grade before being forcibly expelled from the class with an F. I was definitely racist against the language age 13-17. I found the teacher playing and making us sing Macarena especially distasteful and that was part of what made me hateful.))

hackernewds 3y ago
you could literally speak to a human speaker over video chat? there are very affordable services like this
- silverpepsi 3y ago
  I'm confused, what does video chat have to do with anything? this all took place in Colombia

djtango 3y ago

Anyone got good Mandarin content to recommend? Have a goal to be fluent by 40... Am watching Three Body but the dialogue is sometimes a little tricky to follow. When I think about how I assimilated Japanese from Anime, the reason it's so doable (IMO) is that the language used is reasonably straightforward and they actually talk quite slowly. I found this once you watch movies in Japanese and noticed it was harder to pick out what people were saying.

insomagent 3y ago
I live in Taiwan, I've been learning Mandarin for 8 years and use it daily. I kind of can't stand the mainland accent, and I can't understand simplified characters. You may have an easier time finding interesting content if you are learning mainland Chinese. The big problem with Mandarin is that there's a content drought. I ask all my friends here what TV shows, games, YouTubers, movies they recommend. It's kind of hard to find good content in Mandarin. Off the top of my head, though, there are a few really good ones. Here in Taiwan, though, the best stuff is either mixed with Taiwanese (Southern Hokkien) or purely in Taiwanese. That's a bit inaccessible for L2 folks such as myself, but I'm doing the best I can. If you're not interested in Taiwanese content, sorry if these are of no use to you. In no order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_My_Dead_Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_My_Dead_Body https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A4%8D%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E2%80%94%E8%8A%B1%E7%94%B2%E7%94%B7%E5%AD%A9%E8%BD%89%E5%A4%A7%E4%BA%BA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A4%8D%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E2... (Taiwanese heavy, maybe 100% Taiwanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_Love_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_Love_(2021_film) (I think 100% Taiwanese, sorry!) I think the content/culture drought is one of the most difficult factors in learning Chinese, personally. I used to study Japanese very seriously, and there was always a never-ending stream of amazing anime, games, TV shows, music, you name it. I will say, though, if you're into music, the Taiwan indie music scene is world-class. Really good stuff.
- djtango 3y ago
  I know enough Hokkien and Teochew that Taiwanese won't sound completely alien. I'll add it to the list haha - thanks!

dcsan 3y ago

Love this on the desktop, but it's there a way to use on an ipad - where I watch most movies. Or an app that will show subtitles on an alt lang than the spoken track?

presentation 3y ago

Migaku is a paid service that does this, and then lets you record individual segments into Anki flash cards, and works for a variety of video services. Awesome! https://www.migaku.io/ https://www.migaku.io/

davidzweig 3y ago

Hello. Me and Ognjen made this, the main site is now: https://languagereactor.com/ https://languagereactor.com/ Audio and subs usually don't match for dubbed audio tracks (it's usually ok if you watch a French movie with French subs etc.). I have code that processes the Netflix audio with Whisper ASR, it works very well. Hopefully Netflix don't mind us adding this (my email is in my profile), I think we'll bring this online in a couple of weeks. If any other video provider is interested in having Language Reactor support their site, mail me. Also, we're rolling out a 'virtual conversation partner' starting today: https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/chat-feature-is-here/11942 https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/chat-feature...

hackernewds 3y ago
are you planning to migrate the virtual conversation partner to languagereactor.com? Confusing with the "Netflix" part
- davidzweig 3y ago
  The forum runs on the old domain still, the chatbot is on the new page (languagereactor.com).
wodenokoto 3y ago
Prompted by this post I tried language reactor and have a few notes: Can you really only sign in with google? I tried the phrase thingy. I don’t get it. It asks me about a word and shows me a sentence and a translation of the sentence. What’s the point here? Shouldn’t the translation be hidden so I have a chance to translate it myself? There’s a lot of buttons I can click and I don’t get what they do. Shouldn’t I just choose “I understood”, “I didn’t understand” and perhaps a “don’t show this one again”? How do I report that a sentence doesn’t have the word that the app suggests I should learn? How do I report typos in sentences?
- davidzweig 3y ago
  >> Can you really only sign in with google? We've been planning to change auth lib before enabling other login methods, haven't gotten around to it. >> I tried the phrase thingy. I don’t get it. Probably the best info is here, should improve situation: https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/update-learning-stages-flashcards-all-words-panel-phrasepump-api/7991 https://forum.languagelearningwithnetflix.com/t/update-learn... >> How do I report that a sentence doesn’t have the word that the app suggests I should learn? Some words are lemmatised in unexpected ways (el / se are the same lemma). Sometimes the lemmatisation is wrong, despite using sota libs. There's more work to do. >> How do I report typos in sentences? It's not implemented.. I'm not aware of the typo issue. Useful feedback. The project is still a work-in-progress.

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thekogmo 3y ago

also check this out: https://github.com/moismat/netflix-to-md https://github.com/moismat/netflix-to-md

hackernewds 3y ago

But I watch my Netflix primarily on the TV :(

pwpw 3y ago
I found you could use a steam deck + dock to output to a TV then use a cheap wireless keyboard such as a Rii to control the setup from your couch. Then you can use the language reactor plugin in chrome to watch Netflix on your tv! You can substitute the steam deck and dock for any pc + hdmi out.

insomagent 3y ago

I tried "Language Reactor" (Chinese) and it was full of errors and only looked up words as one character, which is borderline useless.