Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

Posted by ph4evers 4/1/2025

Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news(app.fluentsubs.com)

I've been working on a little side project that combines Duolingo-like listening comprehension exercises with real content .

Every video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough for these short exercises.

Would love your thoughts!

472 points | 184 commentspage 4

Miraltar 4/1/2025|

That's neat ! Although I got an issue on the Finnish challenge, when I drag the (correct) word "koho" it transforms into the (incorrect) word "koko". I thought I missclicked and tried the whole challenge again but I reproduced it despite being very careful.

ph4evers 4/1/2025|

Thanks for trying, and sorry about that. I thought that the videos for Finnish where on a decent enough level (only checked one). I'm afraid the transcription quality is not on par yet for Finnish. I'll add a warning for the smaller languages and hopefully the models will improve.

zestyping 4/8/2025||

This is really cool! How did you select the languages to support? I was surprised that you included Finnish and German yet excluded Swedish (the language I would want to use), and I'm wondering what the blockers are for the other Nordic languages.

timeinput 4/1/2025||

This is an amazing concept.

It would be nice to limit the YouTube content a bit like not just news, but an option for news in slow French, or something else. At least for me news in slow French is way easier to understand than news in French at 0.5x in you tube.

Maybe it's just my phone, but the dragging and dropping wasn't hit or miss it was mostly broken. On an English speaking video (my native language) filling in three gaps took me like five video repetitions to get the words in place. It made me feel a lot better about my Spanish speaking performance. Just clicking the words like someone else suggested would solve the problem completely for me, but it might be like a "hit box" problem on the words.

bomewish 4/2/2025||

I'd straight up pay 5 or 10 bucks a month for this if it was like... 200% more functional/featured/professional/working. VERY good proof of concept and I love it. Target language is german fwiw.

ph4evers 4/3/2025|

Thanks for the feedback! It is indeed a PoC that I'm hacking together after work.

I've been working hard to get the quality up. And now that I have some paid users for the large languages I can also auto-transcribe high quality channels. Main reason for the poor exercises (especially for German) was that I initially picked some poor channels and I was being cheap.

I've updated the german channel and that should hopefully result in a better experience.

kmos17 4/1/2025||

Just did one spanish video, worked really well. The interface is simple enough and easy, great start. It would be great to have a translation appear after completing the words, and maybe a way to save words.

dzonga 4/1/2025||

Beautiful work. this has massive potential. I like the video aspect - it's almost as how people learned languages back then by listening to CDs and Tape. but now you can read someone's lips

dvh 4/1/2025||

I placed one word wrong and it didn't tell me what was the correct word, so I learned nothing, I only failed.

Also I'm maybe jlpt4 and the text was too hard, you should let me choose difficulty.

ph4evers 4/1/2025|

Thanks for trying! Sorry about that. I've changed the daily exercise to an easier one for Japanese. Right now it takes random videos from all levels for the exercises, but I'm working on creating one simple one and a more challenging one.

JetSetIlly 4/1/2025||

It's a good idea and something I will be interested in using

However, I was very confused by the interface at first. I started a with a 3 gap exercise. I dragged what I thought was the correct word into the gap. Listened again, changed my mind but I couldn't drag in my new choice. It was a while before I realised that the correct word had been inserted for me. This was despite me not completing the other gaps.

It would be better if the answers weren't given until the user submits the answer.

flyinglizard 4/1/2025|

Looks real nice. I'll be using it. If you could map spacebar to pause/unpause the video by default (without focusing on the YouTube window first) that would be great.

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