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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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://www.lingq.com/en/

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/

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Oh wow - this is awesome!

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/

This is great!

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.

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