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Show HN: Learning Languages with Netflix (Chrome Extension)
3 points by davidzweig on Oct 21, 2018 | hide | past | favorite
Hi. Me and a friend, Ognjen, have been working on a chrome extension for learning languages that works with Netflix.

It aims to solve a few issues the user faces when studying with Netflix:

-- poor subtitles that don't match to the audio (solution: catalogue of titles with faithful subs, see http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html )

-- monolingual subs (solution: provide a machine translation of the original subs that follow in meaning closely, albeit with occasional flaws).

-- dialogue is too quick (solution: give the user the ability to step through the dialogue with keyboard keys, A S D and SPACE).

There's a pop-up dictionary, and also a feature that greys-out infrequent words, based on word frequencies (compiled from OpenSubtitles corpus). It supports 15 languages, but we haven't tested it much yet.

We are both quite happy with how the project turned out.

You can get it on the Chrome Web Store, it's free for 30 days, then paid:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-learning-....

Here's the number of titles in the catalogue in some major languages, although they are not available in all regions, see the catalogue for more info:

English: 8012 titles

Spanish: 480 titles

German: 294 titles

French: 271 titles

Italian: 146 titles

Dutch: 127 titles

Portuguese: 83 titles

Swedish: 89 titles

We didn't just make the extension just because we could.. for an understanding of the pricipals that lead us to the current project, here's something I wrote a year ago or so: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/66myn1/a_...

If we get more than a handful of users, we can also add support for titles with non-latin scripts (there are many titles in Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and add support for more titles. There's also some more features we could add, like merging shorter subs, generating Anki flashcards etc.

Hope you like it.



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