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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 6
burningFish 4/1/2025|
Pretty cool honestly, very nice job. The UX is well made, no distractions, you can consider doing several small sessions during the day to learn during breaks. I love it! I would personally be quite interested in Chinese (in that case, I would strongly recommend putting the accents on latin characters, otherwise users cannot know how to pronounce).

I tried Spanish and Japanese. A tiny recommendation for Japanese: it would be nice to have both kanjis and hiraganas in the same block for the word choices. That way, you can decouple the learning of kanjis from the pure listening.

Great work, really!

CWIZO 4/1/2025||
Great idea. However, the clip I got was spoken so fast that if I was able to actually understand any of it I think I wouldn't be learning Spanish as I'd have already mastered it.

Is there a beginner mode?

dionian 4/1/2025|
you could change the video speed, would be cool if he added a button to do it
JimmyBuckets 4/1/2025||
Awesome idea! Do you plan to add Portuguese soon? I found it surprising that Dutch is in there before it given there are far fewer speakers. Was this related to the amount of content available?
ph4evers 4/1/2025|
Thanks! And yes I'll add it soon. I'm Dutch so I could validate the videos.

> Was this related to the amount of content available?

Yes, Portuguese is available in the app, but I only transcribe the Easy Portuguese videos for now so I don't have a lot of content available at the moment.

rlf_dev 4/1/2025||
I checked the Portuguese content available and you should clarify it's Brazilian (and change the flag to the Brazilian one so it doesn't induce in error).
ph4evers 4/1/2025||
Yes, will do that. Thanks for the suggestion!
ImPleadThe5th 4/1/2025||
This is amazing! Definitely going to use this during my German study!
gokhan 4/1/2025||
Nice work. A similar concept with songs, I guess it was called lyricstraining.com earlier:

https://lingoclip.com/

matwood 4/1/2025||
I liked this a lot. I'm in the process of moving to Italy and am deep in learning Italian. I loved the different speeds and accents from the speakers.
palata 4/1/2025||
This is cool!

I'm curious now: how do you transcribe the videos? And how do you align the transcript with the video (in terms of timing)? Are there libraries doing that?

ph4evers 4/1/2025|
I'm using AssemblyAI and Deepgram. AssemblyAI for the large languages and Deepgram for the smaller ones.
xattt 4/1/2025||
Have you seen Mauril for English-French training?

https://mauril.ca/en/

readthenotes1 4/1/2025||
Apparently I need to sign in to protect the community or s/t

So there was no way to play the video.

Also that blinding flash of white when it starts is unnecessary cruelty

ph4evers 4/1/2025|
Aj, sorry about that. I think it is YouTube blocking you. I didn't think of that edge case yet so I think my app will keep trying to play the video. Thanks for the report.
readthenotes1 4/5/2025||
You fixed the videos!

This is awesome :)

I had to (was able to) slow the videos to 1/2 speed (no tengo muchas parablas dontcha know) but this is much better training than Duolingo

skynetv2 4/1/2025|
I am 600 days on Duolingo I tried Spanish, I did not enjoy it. The videos speak Spanish too fast and the words are alien to me.
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