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Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows
- melkisch 13y agoAre you planning to provide the service in different languages?
- duwip 13y agoThe app currently supports 29 languages
- muraiki 13y agoVery 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.
- Ecio78 13y agoI do this process by downloading subtitles automatically with http://subdownloader.net/ http://subdownloader.net/ or manually from http://www.opensubtitles.org/en 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 :)
- duwip 13y agoA Linux version isn't too far away either - there simply hasn't been much demand for it yet.
- louischatriot 13y agoNow 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.
- Ecio78 13y agothink about integrating with common mediaplayer solutions, like XBMC, MythTV etc..
- mapleoin 13y agoHow can I register more demand?
- duwip 13y agoWell.. Have to say, we had it coming posting on HN ;-)
- StavrosK 13y agoYeah, 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.
- ghostDancer 13y agoYou may try to watch dubbed Tv/Films to spanish, easier to find, and you can find the spanish subtitles http://www.subtitulos.es/ http://www.subtitulos.es/ .
- StavrosK 13y agoOh, that's a good idea! I'll look for some dubbed movies, thank you.
- kurt_ 13y agoI would use it if it was available on linux !
- myle 13y agoIs there a way to get notified when a linux port is available?
- abdullahkhalids 13y agoneed linux
- Swizec 13y agoBrilliant! 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.
- vis52 13y agoQuite 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.
- jwarren 13y agoSmart! Any plans to work with multiple languages? I'm an English-speaker, and I'd love something similar in the other direction.
- duwip 13y agoWe'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...
- whyleyc 13y ago... except that you'd have a ready-made market of 2bn if you did !
- duwip 13y agoAlso, most of the popular tv / movie content in the world is produced in English, which is another reason to start there
- tobeportable 13y agoI 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.
- kraymer 13y agoI 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!
- jmotion 13y agoThis is awesome!
- seyz 13y agoAwesome idea, kudos!
- gawenr 13y agoBrilliant.
- fwinck 13y agoBrilliant idea! I wish I could have studied foreign languages this way...
- polymatter 13y agoPlease don't use flags for disambiguating languages. (http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ 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.
- adamors 13y agoThis. A lot of European countries are either multilingual or have large minorities that speak another country's language natively.
- gngeal 13y agoEven 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.
- pattisapu 13y agoPardon 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.
- digitalengineer 13y agoVery 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.
- serkanh 13y agoThis 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.
- louisdorard 13y agoDoes fleex determine how tricky sentences are automatically?
- duwip 13y agoThis is indeed part of our secret sauce ;-)
- louisdorard 13y agoWould love to hear more about the technological innovations at Fleex — depending on how much you're willing to share!
- forgingahead 13y agoCongrats! 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.
- ssw1n 13y agoI 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.
- crazysaem 13y agoYou could also try http://board.tv4user.de/ 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.
- baby 13y agoThis 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.
- atempcode 13y agoI am curious what you were watching when you learnt Chinese... :)
- baby 13y agoxiyangyang, spongebob, aiqing gongyu... Anything I could find on PPTV or PPS.
- jcampbell1 13y agoFor Chinese, checkout http://chinese.yabla.com/ http://chinese.yabla.com/ or http://fluentu.com/ http://fluentu.com/
- baby 13y agoWow! This is truly awesome. Thanks a LOT for that. I know what I'm gonna do of my time these next weeks now.
- crazysaem 13y agoGreat 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.
- jhuckestein 13y agoI'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.
- dom96 13y agoThat 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.
- visarga 13y agoI'd like Japanese subtitles for Japanese movies. Maybe that way I'd learn to read too.
- m4rkuskk 13y agoI 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.
- jcampbell1 13y agoI 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.
- Dewie 13y agoThis 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. *and with stuff like video games, the Web(!!)...
- cvanderlinden 13y agoAnd plans for doing this for other languages?
- illyism 13y agoIt 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.
- duwip 13y agoNow 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...
- wordreference 13y agoHey! 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. Congratulations!
- duwip 13y agoGlad to hear that, and thanks for letting us use your awesome work in such a convenient way! WordReference rocks ;-)
- KevinBongart 13y agoGreat idea! Does it work with DVDs or is it limited to the (usually illegal) video files available online?
- duwip 13y agoWe've thought about DVDs, but this isn't implemented yet. We're pondering it as DVD doesn't necessarily seem like a platform with much future...
- schme 13y agoAny 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.
- duwip 13y agoNot that we've heard of... Non-English media content is a lot harder to find, I'm afraid.
- gdy 13y agoRussian 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.
- dschiptsov 13y agoClassic Hollywood movies with English subtitles?) The first few seasons of The X-Files and Twin Peaks together with Scorsese movies (in which characters talk a lot) were my choices.)
- dysoco 13y agoSo let's say I have some movie without any kind of subtitles and I play it via Fleex... will it fetch automatically the English or Spanish subtitles? Or that only works with DVDs that include subtitles?
- duwip 13y agoFleex doesn't work with DVDs yet, but your first scenario is fully covered.
- dysoco 13y agoThat's great! I'm Argentinian, yet I can't stand films that are in Spanish: I normally watch them in English although sometimes I have some problems understanding some words (Mainly with American films). So this will add automatically subtitles to it? That's amazing!
- mtrimpe 13y agoPlease, pretty please with sugar on top, also add the ability to delay the subtitles! From listening to a lot of Pimsleur I know that, for me, anticipation and correction is one of the most powerful ways to learn a language. I'm pretty sure that listening to a dialog, trying to work out what is said and being corrected a few seconds later by the actual translation would have an amazing impact on a lot of people (although it might be a bit too hard for beginners.)
- duwip 13y agoIf you click the subtitles settings button, you'll see there's a tab for that. You can also dynamically change your subs selection, in case you're unhappy with the subs fleex auto-selected for you.
- mtrimpe 13y agoCool! Can I sign up to be notified about the Mac version being released? It's HN username at gmail.
- duwip 13y agoJust click the 'MY ACCOUNT' link and create an account. Don't tick the 'no newsletter' box to make sure you'll get the news when the player is out. We'll probably post something here as well when it gets out anyway.
- mullr 13y ago> Fleex shows you mixed subtitles, so you get the hard parts in your language and the easier parts in English. This seems like a Very Hard Problem. How did you approach it? Do you deal with polysemous words gracefully?
- thaumasiotes 13y agoI have long wanted simultaneous subtitles, so you get all parts in both languages.
- w1ntermute 13y agoI'm not the author and I haven't tried the software (on account of not having a Windows machine handy), but I would use a word/collocation frequency list to hide sentences that only contain words/collocations that have a certain or greater frequency. As for polysemous words, I would use contextual analysis to disambiguate as well as possible, and then just show the words that I couldn't disambiguate until the threshold for the least frequently encountered meaning has been passed. Also, I would add a something to the UI to allow the user to, in one click, rewind the video by x seconds (not sure what the optimal value of x would be) and enable all subtitles until the point at which the video had been rewound.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoThe app sounds great ;-) But learning english from media is interesting, and curious... I always say that I learned english from Star Trek and D&D Manuals. That's why I know quite well what a vorpal sword or a wormhole are. But I had to ask a few months after I started living in Ireland how you say that thing in the bathroom where the water came from (a tab)
- duwip 13y agoYou must mean a tap ;-) You seem all set for the future though!
- codecool 13y agoWaiting for the Mac version!
- gingerjoos 13y agos/Mac/Linux :)
- heatherph 13y agoI really like this idea. Native language media is so useful in learning to speak a foreign language. I'm a little jealous of English learners because there is so much available out there. I have had a much harder time getting my hands on good, native language media in the languages I'm learning. I'd love to see a tool like this expanded to other languages.
- tschellenbach 13y agoawesome!
- jczhang 13y agoWhere do the subtitles come from? Are there chinese subtitles available? I always recommended learning English through tv series since you learn about american culture as well, but I wonder if there is a good source of chinese subtitles for english tv series.
- adamzerner 13y agoThe market you're after is people who want to learn a new language. The want they have, is to learn a new language. The question then, is "will this be something people learning a new language will want?" I don't think this is the best way to learn a new language. Learning requires you to push yourself slightly beyond your comfort level/what you know. If you push too far beyond what you already know, learning will be ineffective. The success of a learning system is dependent on how well it is able to push you selectively. This seems like it'll be pushing people "too far". This does seem like a good technology though. I think it can be coupled with another language instruction system. Mostly for people who've already done a lot of learning, but are looking to solidify their knowledge.
- duwip 13y agoI get your concerns - this is precisely why we added adaptative subtitles as one of our first features. So people could say: "I'm a beginner, keep 80% of the subtitles in my native language", vs. "I'm a more advanced speaker, let's go ahead and put 100% of the subtitles in English".
- Dewie 13y agoThat sounds like a great feature. The most frustrating thing about learning languages is that it is so hard to ease into it, and you have to have a relatively solid vocabulary to go beyond canned phrases, but this sounds like it could help with that.
- wiradikusuma 13y agoInteresting! But it's annoying to see "Coming soon on Mac OS X" while the teaser video is showing a Mac app!
- kzim 13y agoSimilar idea: explain.cc
- Flimm 13y agoWhy are you getting the subtitles from? Are they good quality? And have you licensed the subtitles legally?
- stephengillie 13y agoSubtitles have to be licensed? Since when?
- Flimm 13y agoSince copyright. What on earth would make you think that subtitles are exempt from copyright? Song lyrics are copyrighted, screenplays are copyright, so are subtitles.
- xamdam 13y agoBeing mostly American, I will much applaud an effort to do this in reverse, to learn other languages. As a matter of fact I've been thinking this would be a good business idea for a few years now. Do it or I will!
- Void_ 13y agoI want this for French. I couldn't even find TV shows in French with matching French subtitles. Any ideas where to look?
- Ecio78 13y agoArte TV is a french-german Television that broadcasts movies in both languages and with both subtitles (unfortunately teletext subs and not DVB subs). I've seen it on sat (i think on Astra 19.2) but they should have something also online. In this precise moment they have problem on their site: http://www.arte.tv/ http://www.arte.tv/ lol EDIT: it's a cultural channel so don't expect to see Mission Impossible, many movies are self produced etc..
- Ecio78 13y agoPS I'm studying French too because I'm moving to Luxembourg next month. Any HNers there? There has just been last week a Startup Weekend event but unfortunately I couldn't have been there...
- ymn_ayk 13y agoWhat a cool idea! I'm very exited. Good luck
- hawkharris 13y agoAlthough this software is marketed to people who are trying to learn English, it seems to me that, given the fact you can choose a mix between any two languages, it can also help native English speakers learn other languages.
- bambax 13y agoLogin to play => ??? => uninstall.
- znq 13y agoVLSub plugin for VLC Search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org using the hash of the video currently playing or its title. http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/VLSub+0.9.4?content=148752 http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/VLSub+0.9.4?cont...
- nshm 13y agoTo speedup learning one could give user a feedback, not just show him the subtitles. Something like http://englishcentral.com http://englishcentral.com is doing.
- abecedarius 13y agoCan one practice lipreading this way? English subtitles only, but delayed.
- hk__2 13y agoWhy is it Windows-only, since it’s based on VLC which is available on Windows/Mac OS/Linux/…?
- apoint 13y agoWe need the web plugin of VLC for fleex with the windowless mode. The plugin shipped with the 2.0.6 version of VLC works great on PC but have strong performance issues on the mac (in windowless mode). The VideoLAN team is working on it and as soon as this problem is fixed, fleex player will also be available for iOS. As for linux, we're just ignorant... We're looking for someone to package the app for us.
- onemorepassword 13y agoLearn English like a Dutchman and end up with a really confused British/American hybrid accent... ;-) Seriously, subtitles are the main reason most Dutch people speak English, traditional education has very little to do with.
- ronaldx 13y agoThus, what tv would you recommend to learn Dutch? ;)
- vickytnz 13y agoI had a discussion with someone about learning Dutch, as I know many foreigners there who learn to understand it but never speak it as they get spoken back to in English. One suggestion put up was that the Dutch never get people speaking their language badly the way that English speakers do, and so revert to English rather than hear their native language mangled!
- nekopa 13y agoGreat idea, I just have one question, how will you make money? You have a great idea which I could use, and I'd hate to see it go away... As an English teacher (9 years experience) from an IT background (25 odd years, but not all of it active), here are a couple of ideas I thought you might like to look at: 1: Hook it up to a lesson planning system. I use videos a lot in my classes, and also try to set them for homework. Currently I use TED.com, as their older videos have full text transcripts available (the feature where you can click on a word and it takes you directly to the point in the video they say it is priceless), as well as subtitles in various languages. Think of a way a teacher could set up a simple worksheet (PDF or online) for students to use with the video. This worksheet could include pre-watching questions, including pre-teaching of difficult language that may come up in the video, and then some language activities to do after watching to reinforce anything they learn. Bonus points if you could hook this into an online learning platform such as moodle so that it would integrate with a language course. Set up social sharing in two areas, one for teachers to share lesson ideas based on vids, and one for students watching the vids and you basically could make your own video learning platform. English teachers have no money and are pretty badly paid, (I make my extra cash consulting, but I just love teaching) so you can't target teachers directly, but, make it free for individuals, build evangelists among them, then target schools and universities with extra features such as participation reporting, gradebooks, enhanced cryptographic security (the EU has pretty tough Data protection laws), institution branding and so on. 2: Integrate it with Hulu or Netflix, and make it a value add for both sides. Hulu or Netflix can add an extra "learn with us" feature, and people could choose to add it to certain shows either on an episode by episode basis or for whole seasons. Again add options for social integration, and, if you do point 1 from above, have 'featured' teachers who make lessons based on your platform and also get a cut of the pie. Conversely you could speak to rights holders and negotiate with them directly (e.g. I see a lot of people on this thread talking about "Friends", so more popular shows could garner higher rates for learning from them) 3: Building on points 1 and 2 above: segment your market - shows with legal or business vocabulary could charge more. Military shows (band of brothers etc) could be marketed to NATO etc, etc. Along with social you could integrate gamification, which I think would work well in this kind of situation, with the added benefit that you could work with language examining bodies to match your 'badges' with real world targets of language learning. Although good luck working with those arrogant assholes from Cambridge :) 4: No clear money with this idea, this is just for cool factor- do something similar to hiphop genius and crowd source language interpretations and meanings. They figured out how to get funding, so can you. (This actually would be really cool, as I can see linguists arguing with people who actually use the language :) So I am an 'idea guy' and this doesn't fly on HN. But this time I feel that I finally have enough domain expertise to comment, and I am actually trying to implement some of these ideas at the moment, I just don't have the tech chops (or hardware to be honest) to deal with working with video on this scale. But I am working on language points (I have an idea about your 'secret sauce', but don't worry, your secret is safe with me Batman ;) as I am in the midst of running an online language course for an EU project at the moment and creating all the materials from scratch, by hand, and it is a pain! I would love to chat with you guys if you are serious about making money from this, my email is in my profile (it's basically my HN username @ gmail). Meanwhile, I have over a hundred students who I need to email with a link to your site and I need to figure out how I can integrate your work with my axe (I mean my teaching :)
- duwip 13y agoFor any of you having some technical issues with the player, and for some willing to upgrade, v1.1.0 is out. Link on our home page!
- coob 13y agoHow does the idiom detection work? Big DB of them in English?
- leoplct 13y agolooking forward Mac version (or web version)
- duwip 13y agoYou can check out the streaming part of the site at fleex.tv/Home/Streaming. We have a large selection of videos, from TED talks to web series to web-produced movies.
- rajanikanthr 13y agoI am from India and until high school studied in non english medium..though I am able communicate well in English thanks to eslpod.com podcasts, preparation for GRE/TOEFL (increased vocabulary) and lots of english movies.
- ergest 13y agoI learned Italian while watching Italian TV and movies with subtitles in Albanian. After a while, you pick things up without any conscious effort.
- tdiggity 13y agoWhat languages are supported? I'm on a mac, so I didn't install the player.
- taproot 13y agoWhat about going the other way? I'd love to learn another language form movies / tv shows.
- robleclerc1 13y agoCool, looks like BabbleFlix, which I tried starting in 2009, but ran out of runway. Check out the videos on YouTube for so possible improvements.
- vis52 13y agoFirst time posting here at HN, long time reader though. I am fluent in English and German with no accent and I never had any formal education in either. Well that's not completely true as I did have standard English classes in primary and high school but that doesn't count because that stuff was pretty useless. I learned both languages by watching endless hours of English and German TV, first cartoons as a kid and then the rest later on. Actually for English it was pretty much Cartoon Network so in a sense Cartoon Network taught me English. One thing that surprises most people is that all of this was completely without subtitles. I'm not sure how one goes from not knowing a word of a language to speaking it fluently by watching and listening to a foreign language with no reference points but that's how it went for me.
- chiph 13y agoWell, at least people aren't learning English by listening to Howard Cosell. (Better Off Dead is one of John Cusack's best films, IMO. Even if he hates it.)