[HN Gopher] Language Learning with Netflix ___________________________________________________________________ Language Learning with Netflix Author : impoppy Score : 100 points Date : 2023-05-06 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (languagelearningwithnetflix.com) (TXT) w3m dump (languagelearningwithnetflix.com) | MehdiHK wrote: | I recently switched to https://www.trancy.org/ | soegaard wrote: | Chrome states that the new version of Language Reactor has been | disabled, because the extenstion can read and change data on all | amazon sites. | throwawaymaths wrote: | All I want is star trek the next generation in LATAM spanish. | Practically know that series by heart | vignesh_warar wrote: | Happy to see my favorite extension on HackerNews! I have been | using this extension to learn French, and it works quite well for | me. | yarg wrote: | I'd love to see video with subtitles in both the source language | and the target language, with edges between the corresponding | terms. | | (Not perfect of course, translations never are, but for me (at | least) it would ease understanding.) | mentos wrote: | Trying to learn French I exported all the subtitles for an | episode of a French tv show 'Lupin' and then worked my way | through reading it first and then watched it but unfortunately | felt no easier. Probably because reading it once through really | isn't enough. | | Would be fun if there was an entire 10 week course that worked | up to an episode of real tv that by the time you get to it | watching is completely fluent. | watwut wrote: | What worked for me was to read a scene in advance and then | watch that scene. Or watch with subtitles and then again | without them. Whole show is too long. | mumblemumble wrote: | For Spanish, _Destinos_ is something like that. It 's a | reasonably interesting telenovela that starts out with | beginner-level language and quickly works up to more | interesting dialogue. | | https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction- | to-s... | pbhjpbhj wrote: | There a podcast I follow occasionally, the presenter does a | brief news-style interest story in a random subject. The | first read through is sometimes incomprehensible (to me) but | then he breaks down each phrase, and explains them (in French | mostly). At the end he reads the piece in full again, and | it's mostly comprehensible ... but that's a 2 minute piece of | speech. Trying to do that for a whole movie would be way too | much for me. | | Perhaps that would suit you too: | | Learn French with daily podcasts | https://www.chosesasavoir.com | | RSS address: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/FODL4957050068 | | I use AntennaPod installed with F-Droid, far and away the | best podcast player I've found. | | (No affiliations or associations, just what I've found | useful) | cmehdy wrote: | You might be interested in RFI's "easy" French news: | https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/journal-en- | fran%C3... | | They have articles and audio+transcript news if I remember | correctly. I'm French myself but I found a lot of good | opportunities to learn things organically in other | languages when following the news (in Japanese for me that | was NHK Easy: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ ) | | Bon courage pour ton apprentissage! | leke wrote: | I think that's called translinear translation. I like the idea, | but hard to find the content. I never thought to look for film | though. I wonder if there is a site where you can download | movie subtitles. | visarga wrote: | See my other post | yarg wrote: | You'd want something more powerful than subtitles - otherwise | you get n^2 scaling with the number of languages. | detrites wrote: | I think you mean "interlinear" translation. Or aka a "gloss": | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss | | Particularly, in the Structure section the Taiwanese example. | impoppy wrote: | This extension scratches that exact itch -- having audio in | German and captions both in German and English for example | visarga wrote: | I think language study just got an overpowered AI teacher. This | works more or less for any pair of languages. | | I am using GPT4 to reformat text from English to Japanese in easy | reading mode. It is very good for language study using topics of | interest. | | > Si ha (Watashi wa) [I am] GPT4woShi tsute (GPT4 o tsukatte) | [using GPT4] Ying Yu kara (Eigo kara) [from English] Ri Ben Yu he | (Nihongo e) [to Japanese] Jian Dan naDu miWu (Kantan na | yomimono) [easy reading mode] niBian Huan shimasu. (ni henkan | shimasu) [to reformat] soreha (Sore wa) [It is] Xing Wei Shen | itopitsuku (Kyoumi bukai topikku) [interesting topics] woShi | tsute (o tsukatte) [using] Yan Yu Xue Xi (Gengo gakushuu) | [language study] nitotemoLiang i (ni totemo yoi) [very good] | desu. (desu) [is] | | Same, but in German: | | > Ich benutze (I am using) [ikh benoot-se] GPT4 (GPT4) [ge-pe-te- | fear] um Text (to reformat text) [oom tekst] aus Englisch (from | English) [aus engl-ish] zu Japanisch (to Japanese) [tsoo yap-an- | ish] in einfachem Lesemodus (in easy reading mode) [in ine-fakh- | em leh-se-moh-dus] umzuformatieren (to reformat) [oom-tsoo-for- | ma-teer-en]. Es ist sehr (It is very) [es ist zehr] gut fur (good | for) [goot fuhr] Sprachstudium (language study) [shprakh-shtoo- | dee-oom] mit interessanten (using interesting) [mit int-er-es- | sant-en] Themen (topics) [tay-men]. | | The prompt I used: | | Create a Japanese easy reading mode version of the given English, | breaking it into 2-4 word chunks, providing romaji and English | translations in brackets for each phrase. This is intended for | language study purposes. | | ~~ | | Of course this is just a reader prompt, we could also have chat | mode, asking clarifying questions, asking for more examples of a | phrase, generate quizzes, etc. | | I am at this weird point where I know phonetically much more than | I can read. This formatting helps a lot because you get to see | the Kanji first, then you use romaji and English only when | necessary. Being different scripts helps separate them visually | so as not to read the romaji before I want to. | BeretEnjoyer wrote: | Do you usually use GPT4 to translate from English, or was that | just for the example in your comment? Because the translated | output highlights the major problem of this learning-through-AI | approach: The generated output can just simply be wrong, like | it is here (both the Japanese and German). | visarga wrote: | I think it is good enough to "break into" the text. It's not | the most literary translation but you could just start from a | Japanese text if that's what you wanted. I went for modding | the English text I am currently reading as a language | exercise. | zx321 wrote: | Check out the browser extension Yomichan. It does something | very similar. | sneed_chucker wrote: | The Ich -> ikh transliteration is wrong. Of course there are a | bunch of German photetics which you can't translate into direct | English transliterations because the sound inventory is | different. | | That being said, GPT is still pretty powerful for language | learning but you really have to verify more than you trust. | froh wrote: | and "ish" would do instead of "ikh", just to also offer the | solution to the riddle. | kebsup wrote: | I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found learning | language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles and dialog | don't match, neither for dubbing or original. | mumblemumble wrote: | I find YouTube to be vastly better for language learning. Good | subtitles are surprisingly easy to come by, the variety of | content is much greater, and you can also download the | transcripts for offline study. And, perhaps even better yet, | the videos tend to be short. Repetition is super important for | rapid progress, and it's much easier for me to watch a 10 | minute video two or three times than it is something that's 30 | minutes or longer. | | If you're willing to shell out some money, YouTube + LingQ | (which has a plugin for automatically ripping audio+transcripts | into lessons) is so effective it's almost like cheating. | morkalork wrote: | YouTube appears be using ML SST subtitles most of the time | and tends to trip over simple things like homonyms and at | worst throws up its hands and just skips over difficult | (noisy, cross-talk, etc.) segments. I say this as someone | taking a 2nd language course where we'll watch a video | together and do a worksheet and class discussion in that | language after. Sometimes the instructor's reaction at the | end will be "wow those subtitles were bad!" | | Edit for clarity: the subtitles are in the foreign language, | not English so it's not an issue of machine translation. | toxik wrote: | _[Music]_ | drowsspa wrote: | Really? Most transcripts and translations I encounter are so | bad. Do you mean specific videos or channels? | est31 wrote: | It still helped me because even though it didn't match 100%, it | at least gave me an idea of what the original dialog was about. | Then I could derive the content from it. And it made fun to | figure out the differences between what was written and what | was said. | NikolaNovak wrote: | Is that the difference between subtitles and closed captioning? | | If I recall, one is made from original script, one is typed up | from aftually spoken audio. | TacticalCoder wrote: | > I don't know if this extension foxes it, but I've found | learning language through Netflix difficult as the subtitles | and dialog don't match, neither for dubbing or original. | | 100 000 times this. I don't understand _why_ it 's like that | but they simply often don't match. And it's not some automated | translation that went wrong: it's as if the subtitles didn't | match exactly the final "script". They don't match but the | subtitles are still totally correct. Sometimes the sentences | are formulated differently. | | It's honestly both a mystery and a gigantic WTF for me. Are | these only meant for deaf people? And how did they manage to | get "correct but non-matching" subtitles? | rocketbop wrote: | I would assume it's the same as book translations, the point | isn't to translate it directly but in a way that makes sense | in the target language. Although maybe a lot of subtitles for | lesser TV and movies don't have a lot of human input and the | handler just goes with the softwares suggestion a lot of the | time. | d1sxeyes wrote: | I always assumed the opposite: the translated subtitles | reflect exactly what the script says, while the actor may | have remembered an approximation of the exact line, which is | normally good enough not to bother with another take. | mumblemumble wrote: | They typically hire two different companies to do the | translations, and the translations are optimized for | different goals. Subtitles are just meant to be easy to read. | With dubs they try to make what's being said at least vaguely | line up with what the actors' lips are doing in an effort to | avoid the infamous "1970s kung fu movie" effect. | bombolo wrote: | The english subtitles for italian shows on netflix are so | bad. They just mistranslate words or sentences for some | reason. | watwut wrote: | Afaik, they are done by two different teams. | | Plus, dubbing is sorta kinda trying to match the length of | time actors need to say stuff. You cant have sound going | while actors mouth are not moving at all. Nor the opposite - | translation is done and actors mouth is still moving. And so | those movements can not look completely odd. Written | subtitles has no such limitations, resulting in different | translation. | dr_kiszonka wrote: | Good insight. In this case, why don't they display the | dubbing text when dubbed audio is playing? | watwut wrote: | If I had to guess, it just does not exists in subtitle | form, no one ever added time information to the | translation. Otherwise you had it in subtitles options | with cc. | | Some shows have two versions of subtitles available - one | with cc other without. Likely, majority of consumers are | not learning language specifically and are just watching | the show and normal subtitles are superior in that case. | pferdone wrote: | Language learning via hearing comprehension of content not | produced in the target language is almost impossible, because | the subtitles never match. | | However there's s difference between CC (close captions) and | subtitles, with the former being the verbatim representation | (including sfx, music etc.) in my experience. | | I already commented [0] on this 2 years ago. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27420959#27435311 | phil294 wrote: | Correct, and you can find CCs more likely on movies and shows | that were shot in the respective language itself. For | example, the stuff from | https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/100396 is much more | likely to have 100% accurate captions if your goal is to | learn Spanish | watwut wrote: | I found dubbed shows significantly easier to listen then | native shows. It is actually easier to learn from those then | from native shows. Dubbing is almost always better pronounced | and less mixed with background sounds. | | Also, the claim that it is impossible to learn if you don't | have perfect cc subtitle in target language is absurd. You | can use subtitles in own language to get the meaning. | nosefrog wrote: | My friend's startup is similar but for YouTube videos: | polyglatte.com | jacooper wrote: | It supports youtube and other platforms | | https://www.languagereactor.com/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-06 23:00 UTC)