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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 5
sharmasachin98 4/1/2025|
This feels like a great blend of immersion and repetition. Curious if you’re doing any difficulty adaptation based on content complexity or vocabulary frequency?
adilmoujahid 4/1/2025||
Great idea! How did you decide on the pricing?

I launched a Japanese Kanji Learning App (KanjiMaster.ai) last month, and I chose a subscription instead of a one-time payment.

ph4evers 4/1/2025|
Thanks! I decided on it because I think people are fed up with subscription systems and it was easy to implement. However, I made two sales (yay! first time ever) but I paid $20 today to DeepL. I might change it in the future.
adilmoujahid 4/1/2025||
I just purchased 6 months of Pro access. Good luck with this project! It has good potential.
ph4evers 4/2/2025||
Thank you!!
whycome 4/1/2025||
The click and drag UX is cool. BUT, it’s super annoying that it reorganizes every time you drag one off. So the next one you may have been looking to drag has now moved (or it means you accidentally grab the incorrect one). Can they stay in their positions? (Eg, replace in place with a greyed out version of the removed word)
emurph55 4/3/2025||
Really enjoy this method. Please add Irish if you can! TG4 could be used as possible source material: https://www.youtube.com/@TG4TV/videos
ph4evers 4/3/2025|
Thank you!

I'm using AssemlbyAI and Deepgram for the transcripts at the moment. Unfortunately, they don't support Irish. However, I did see this: https://elevenlabs.io/speech-to-text/irish . Not sure how accurate it is.

sharperguy 4/1/2025||
Hmm, embedded youtube videos just do not work for me anymore. Maybe because I have too many privacy extensions enabled in firefox. I just get the "sign in to prove you're not a bot" message, and no way to sign in except manually opening youtube and trying to find the same video.
tom1337 4/1/2025||
I wonder if this could be used as something like early recaptcha. Have a machine do transcriptions and for the parts where it's not entirely sure just let users play the game and then accept what most users chose as the correct solution. Later on train your automatic transcriber on this.
hombre_fatal 4/1/2025||
Nice UX.

News is good because it is inherently more interesting than any old video vs having to curate a bunch of interesting videos. It's also good that the videos loop—most tools that have tried to sync videos seem to never autoloop which means you have to keep manually playing it which is annoying.

Some improvements:

Increase the amount of exercise videos for the pro subscription—I only see three and only one new 2min video per day. The format is good enough to be a regular learning tool. I'd rather see a wall of pro-only videos when evaluating whether I went to subscribe. You want to give a sense of immediate value via backlog that the user will unlock since the impulse buy is that I get to immediately do a bunch of exercises because I loved the teaser exercise.

I think the ideal is that I like the demo lesson, I register, I click the exercises list to do another exercise, and I see a bunch of paywalled interesting videos that I'll be able to watch&learn, so I pay right there on the spot after clicking a video that I wanted to listen to.

Exercises:

- Alphabetize the word list so they are easier to find. Takes me forever to find words in this kind of setup, same on Duolingo.

- Allow text input even with the word list visible. The exercise customization option would then just be "Show word bank: boolean".

- Let us click words.

ph4evers 4/1/2025|
These are some really awesome ideas for UX, thank you!

And I agree. The value from "Pro" should be very clear. What do you think about the one-time payments? Do you think that works or should it be a subscription?

Caduceus1 4/1/2025||
Any timeline for other languages? Would very much like to see Greek. Alvast bedankt ;)
deepfriedchokes 4/1/2025||
This is awesome!

My biggest request would be the ability to slow down the videos for those of us who are beginners.

“Gaps” wasn’t clear to me in the settings initially, but is obvious once you start. Maybe clarify it a little?

Otherwise I enjoyed this a lot! Nice work!

ivan_gammel 4/1/2025|
That’s cool. I managed to guess several sentences without even watching videos.
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