Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

fleex.tv

287 pointsduwip158 comments

I'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.

That 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.

I'd like Japanese subtitles for Japanese movies. Maybe that way I'd learn to read too.

I 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.

I 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.

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough exposure to it. So if I want to adapt a new accent, it's more a question of imitating it until I do it organically - faking it till I make it.

Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.

Yes, it is so hard. I am learning Hindi and I can't even hear the difference between several of the consonants, making it very difficult to measure how well I'm pronouncing them. My Chicago friends can't hear the difference when I say Kyle and Karl, so can't teach themselves to imitate it. And even if they could, changing pronunciation habits takes a lot of attention to the way you speak, which takes effort, which is basically the definition of hard. Its nice that its easy for you, but you should try thinking of it as a skill you have rather than sound like you think everyone else is just lazy.

I didn't mean to say that everyone else is lazy - I just thought that having a native accent wasn't a priority for most people. People can usually make themselves understood perfectly as long as their accent isn't too deviant, and having an accent has its own charm :)

Different English accents have a massive variety of vowel and consonant sounds, and usually one can find a "difficult" vowel sound in some English accent. As a counter-example, in my experience Spanish accents have very little vowel sound variation.

Perhaps learning how to mimic accents of people from different regions (Irish, Jordie, Scottish, Alabama, BBC etc etc) of your own mother tongue gives you opportunity to learn how to hear and say different vowels and consonants from another language. Or practice the accent off non-native speakers e.g. a French accent for a Parisian speaking English.

> "what is it like to have no accent?"

This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.

I had a Danish friend at University and she asked me how good her English was. I told her it was perfect, but she would never be taken for someone British as there was no sense of "place" or "class" with her accent.

You can normally make assumptions about someone's place or class within a few words or phrases in the UK

EG "fillum" for "film" for people from the North East, "supper" instead of "dinner" for middle/upper class people.

But if someone copies that behaviour would they get the same benefits?

Some correlated traits: * mimicking. A critical skill, which is poorly encouraged as a general skill, and as adults we often have habits or beliefs that interfere with it. * perseverance and repetition * exploring/using different ways of learning and working out what are effective means of learning and ignoring invalid common techniques. * Avoiding book learning and rule based learning.

My belief is: look at how a baby or child manages to do it, try to do what they do, and avoid using any parts of the brain they don't use when learning. Not to say I am fluent in another language, just to say what I see in successful second language speakers, and how I try to begin learning (I mostly lack perseverance and repetition!)

"Where did you learn English?"

"College. And the Police Academy movies."

Did it watching cartoons when I was younger...

It was a Wayne's World joke.

Oh if only watching tv was enough to get rid of the accent! As a dane, my accent at its worst sounds like someone making fun of a deaf person

Same here as a french guy. Even worse is that I can usually hide it pretty well (or at least diminish it) until I have to pronounce the letter 'R'. Damn R's...

What would be the equivalent french show for going the other way? I found Braquo on Hulu and started watching/translating/studying it, but realized pretty quickly that most of what they say should not be said in good company.

Try "Un gar une fille", it deals with typical, every day situations so it's good for vocabulary. Unfortunately, it may not be suitable for beginners. The conversations are fast paced and I haven't been able to find any French subtitles for it.

The problem is reversed for those of us learning French. Tough pronouncing the 'err' :)

I think it is dependent on which accent you have. In my experience as an american (who has met a lot of foreigners), I have found that germans and the dutch seem to have the least problem with the american accent. (Australians too, for a non-european example). There can be a number of reasons for this to be the case, but this is what I have noticed.

Why would you want to lose your accent? Accents make people sound more interesting

I did, and still do the same thing. I can't even recall how many times I watched friends, entourage or deadwood. (I'm a Kraut, too, by the way). It helps massively, especially with slang. I want to do the same thing now for spanish.

Edit: Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.

In Once You're Lucky. Twice You're Good by Sarah Lacy, she humorously recounts Max Levchin learning English from TV:

He’d worked so hard to be perfect—what could he possibly have done wrong? It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.

“Where did you learn English?” the teacher asked.

Max responded: “Watchu talkin’ ‘bout, Mr. Harris?”

Mr. Harris kindly suggested he switch from Different Strokes reruns to the nightly news. Embarrassed but undeterred, Max did, and his near-flawless English steadily improved.

A woman serving in a bread shop in Cataluña thought I was retarded, ...but a native retard -- so that was pretty impressive considering I had only learned Spanish for 6 months.

"serving in a bread shop" = baker? Or at least "a woman serving in a bakery" :P

If the bread is made off site and all they do is sell the bread, can you still call it a bakery?

When I moved to the states at age 15, I came from a very prestigious English language school from my native country. As a result my written English was excellent, but nobody could understand my accent and I could not understand the American (or, more precisely, Californian) accent either.

It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.

As an Englishman, I think it's sad that when non-native English speakers learn the language they target an American accent.

It's a sign of our times. Indian English follows more or less the British pattern (colour instead of color etc.). However, recent times have seen a marked shift towards American spellings and pronunciation. I would imagine this is the case in other former British colonies as well.

As long as they keep reading P.G. Wodehouse...

It's because of cultural influences such as Hollywood.

Oh, I understand why it is, but it doesn't stop me complaining :-)

I'm starting to feel some sympathy with the Academie Francaise [1]. At least the US English <--> British English traffic in terms of idioms isn't all one way [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19929249

Please don't use flags for disambiguating languages.

(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.

This. A lot of European countries are either multilingual or have large minorities that speak another country's language natively.

Even 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.

Pardon 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.

It's a piece of internet slang meaning "I strongly agree" and it adds just as much to the conversation (that is, nothing).

They're agreeing with the parent.

It's shorthand for 'I agree with what this guy said'. An alternative is '+1'

It's the same thing as "+1". ;-)

The flags are something that have been used by sites for years, a lot of people are used to it. I speak English but am Canadian, I know to look for the Union Jack if I want English and the French flag for France. Perhaps it's not as simple in other places, but I really don't think it's a big issue. A lot of people can figure it out with a very minimal level of thought/remembering prior experiences. The Union Jack for instance could represent Gaelic, Welsh or Cornish, but most people know it means English. To me, I rather liked seeing the flags, I thought it was a nice touch and added to the look and feel (rather than writing out the language name in subtitle font).

Who cares? Focus on the central point. DH6. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I'm sorry, I don't see how I'm disagreeing with an awesome Show HN. I was trying to provide feedback to improve UX. I like this, I want it to succeed, I personally know English teachers who can recommend it to their students.

The use of flags to disambiguate languages is a trivial point because it's impact on the success or failure of the idea is minimal.

but in this case it's about the written language and less about verbal dialects.

Chinese and Cantonese are representable by the same written language.

Sorry, no.

> "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences" from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese).

Fluent and literate Cantonese are not automatically fluent and literate in Mandarin. In the same way fluent and native English speakers are not automatically fluent and literate in German, despite using the same alphabet and sharing some vocabulary and grammar.

Please, 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.)

If 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.

Cool! Can I sign up to be notified about the Mac version being released? It's HN username at gmail.

Just 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.

Smart! Any plans to work with multiple languages? I'm an English-speaker, and I'd love something similar in the other direction.

We'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...

... except that you'd have a ready-made market of 2bn if you did !

Also, most of the popular tv / movie content in the world is produced in English, which is another reason to start there

I 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.

I 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!

This 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.

I am curious what you were watching when you learnt Chinese... :)

xiyangyang, spongebob, aiqing gongyu... Anything I could find on PPTV or PPS.

For Chinese, checkout http://chinese.yabla.com/ or http://fluentu.com/

Wow! This is truly awesome. Thanks a LOT for that. I know what I'm gonna do of my time these next weeks now.

I do this process by downloading subtitles automatically with http://subdownloader.net/ or manually from 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 :)

A Linux version isn't too far away either - there simply hasn't been much demand for it yet.

think about integrating with common mediaplayer solutions, like XBMC, MythTV etc..

How can I register more demand?

Well.. Have to say, we had it coming posting on HN ;-)

Now 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.

Yeah, 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.

You may try to watch dubbed Tv/Films to spanish, easier to find, and you can find the spanish subtitles http://www.subtitulos.es/ .

Oh, that's a good idea! I'll look for some dubbed movies, thank you.

I would use it if it was available on linux !

Is there a way to get notified when a linux port is available?

need linux

I want this for French.

I couldn't even find TV shows in French with matching French subtitles. Any ideas where to look?

Arte 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/ lol

EDIT: it's a cultural channel so don't expect to see Mission Impossible, many movies are self produced etc..

PS 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...

VLSub 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?cont...

Learn 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.

Thus, what tv would you recommend to learn Dutch? ;)

I 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!

The 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)

You must mean a tap ;-) You seem all set for the future though!

Although 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.

> 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?

I have long wanted simultaneous subtitles, so you get all parts in both languages.

I'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.

Why are you getting the subtitles from? Are they good quality? And have you licensed the subtitles legally?

Subtitles have to be licensed? Since when?

Since copyright. What on earth would make you think that subtitles are exempt from copyright? Song lyrics are copyrighted, screenplays are copyright, so are subtitles.

This 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.

You and I are in the same boat. I use Duolingo for now, but I'm looking for more movies/shows in Spanish. If anyone knows any good Spanish (as in Spain) shows, please recommend!

Check out Yabla: http://www.yabla.com/

Congrats! 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.

First 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.

The 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.

I 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".

That 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.

Brilliant! 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.

Quite 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.

Very 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.

I 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.

You could also try 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.

Great 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.

I 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.

Great 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 :)

Nekopa,

These are all good ideas, that we've of course considered and been pondering for quite a while now. There are various difficulties associated with them, at various degrees. Personally I tend to think that in most cases, ideas are relatively cheap: finding the right way to implement them in a way that's highly scalable really is the hard part.

We can of course chat sometime this week - as a teacher, we'd of course love to hear what you have to say. Could you maybe send us an email (see our contact page) with your availability?

Thanks for replying!

Yes, indeed, ideas are cheap.

But I have to point out one thing: implementation can also be cheap; get it working first, then think about scale. I know everyone aims for the hockey stick, but before you can get there, do something to monetize, even if it is small scale. For example, point 1 above, I am already doing it. I am already thinking how to make a simple document I can send to my students along with a link to your site that would make the learning experience worthwhile for them. Make that simple for me to do and you have a way to money. If you need to think about how to implement: to start, just put out ideas (use cases but in a simplified form that users can understand) of how people can use your service. Maybe throw up a couple of PDFs or blog posts with basic outlines of how teachers or students can use your service. Think of them as help files. Set up a forum where people can discuss what they are doing with your site and share ideas. Both of these ideas are simple to implement (simple PDF downloads/wordpress and a forum with simple moderation). From there you can gather data to move onto monetization (I hate that term, monetization, can anyone offer a better word?) I will email you via your contact form, but honestly, I want to compete with you!

That's fine. Competition is a healthy thing ;-)

Very 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.

Where 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.

It 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.

Now 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...

Why is it Windows-only, since it’s based on VLC which is available on Windows/Mac OS/Linux/…?

We 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.

I think Alex meant OSX, not iOS here. As for Linux, he's right that it's mostly a matter of packaging - which I think puts the prospect of a Linux release closer than that of an OSX release.

Thanks.

I 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.

Being 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!

So 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?

Fleex doesn't work with DVDs yet, but your first scenario is fully covered.

That'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!

Hey! 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!

Glad to hear that, and thanks for letting us use your awesome work in such a convenient way! WordReference rocks ;-)

To speedup learning one could give user a feedback, not just show him the subtitles. Something like http://englishcentral.com is doing.

Classic 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.)

Any 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.

Not that we've heard of... Non-English media content is a lot harder to find, I'm afraid.

Russian 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.

I learned Italian while watching Italian TV and movies with subtitles in Albanian. After a while, you pick things up without any conscious effort.

Well, 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.)

Cool, looks like BabbleFlix, which I tried starting in 2009, but ran out of runway. Check out the videos on YouTube for so possible improvements.

For 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!

And plans for doing this for other languages?

Interesting! But it's annoying to see "Coming soon on Mac OS X" while the teaser video is showing a Mac app!

What about going the other way? I'd love to learn another language form movies / tv shows.

Great idea!

Does it work with DVDs or is it limited to the (usually illegal) video files available online?

We'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...

What languages are supported? I'm on a mac, so I didn't install the player.

Can one practice lipreading this way? English subtitles only, but delayed.

Are you planning to provide the service in different languages?

The app currently supports 29 languages

How does the idiom detection work? Big DB of them in English?

Does fleex determine how tricky sentences are automatically?

This is indeed part of our secret sauce ;-)

Would love to hear more about the technological innovations at Fleex — depending on how much you're willing to share!

What a cool idea! I'm very exited. Good luck

Waiting for the Mac version!

s/Mac/Linux :)

Similar idea: explain.cc

Awesome idea, kudos!

looking forward Mac version (or web version)

You 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.

This is awesome!

Brilliant.

awesome!

This 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(!!)...

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