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

One more thing, just in general: Some people are complaining that some languages work better than others. This seems to be a common issue now with the availability of AI (both voice recognition and LLMs): there's a temptation to expand into as many languages as possible, simply because you can.

My advice would be to have languages default to an "alpha" state, and only progress them to "beta" and "1.0" state when they reach certain milestones, as defined by community feedback.

I've checked out the Japanese one, but I'd say that it's definitely no where near "real-world content" IMO. Just the usual tortuously slow-paced, artificially dumbed-down dialogue you'd expect out of classroom recordings.

Most of the videos also contain subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the exercises (you can disable the video manually though). Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally (e.g. [み][ません]), so it's unclear how you're expected to fill them in.

In the end if what you really want is "real-world content", then you just need to go out there and find them yourselves - they're everywhere.

Great stuff!

Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.

This has a ton of potential! Keep going!

Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.

But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.

You can do it!

This is great - I've actually started building something similar myself a few months ago.

Requests:

- Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America

- Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)

- Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)

One minor but very nice aspect of the UX is that I was able to click the link and immediately try it out. I wasn't even planning to really use it but ended up completing a round. My only complaint is that the drag and drop is kind of annoying as the default selection process, clicking would feel more natural.

For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.

This is so good! I've been looking for a tool that will simulate the "listen to the Spiderman movie 50x" experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eliB_y0fmSk and this site can do it!

I tried an exercise with Italian, but for some reason one of the words is not in the list to drag and drop ("qualcuno"), so I’m stuck: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1r2cv004m8v1pr775ko...

Edit: also tried in French, and it shows some words in red (I guess that means "invalid" -- please don’t convey information with color only) although they are correct: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1o6d5002s8v1p2h0m2f...

Really enjoy this method. Please add Irish if you can! TG4 could be used as possible source material: https://www.youtube.com/@TG4TV/videos

Just a quick note – the "Configure Your Exercise" step was a bit confusing. It took me a while to figure out what “Number of Gaps” even meant, since that’s not something I’d usually think about configuring.

Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.

Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.

Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.

I just tried the Dutch (my native language) version, and it looks neat, but at some point it asked me to type Emmeloord, which is a small town in the Netherlands. That would be very challenging for someone learning the language without being relatively familiar with the Netherlands, so maybe you can tell the LLM to avoid names?

Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.

Just a friendly heads up, for the Japanese exercises the video starts just a bit too late and the word you're listening for is cut off. This might only be pertinent for languages where vocab words are appearing at the beginning of sentences, French and Spanish didn't have "gap words" at their sentence start for the few exercises I tried.

This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.

My biggest complaint about Duolingo is the lack of feedback about how to improve. There are several words whose pronunciations I think I correctly have but the app doesn't understand my pronunciations ever. There are also some words whose dictionary translations aren't provided or are used differently than the translation help offers. Without feedback to ask questions and get answers it's very frustrating.

The few UX things can make for a really frustrating experience. You don’t want to push away your users in their first testing.

1. Change the word “gaps” to “blanks” for English audiences. It fits the common phrase “fill in the blanks” better. And maybe call it that too.

2. Don’t make the blocks move around for the drag and drop. It makes for a frustratingly slow process to find where the word you were about to grab moved to.

3. Don’t just correct a wrong answer, show what the user chose. I had too many moments where I was convinced the answer was what I had selected. Even using the red/green doesn’t quite make sense if you’ve replaced an incorrect answer with a now correct answer.

3. Consider doing the check after all words have been dropped in so they can read the sentence as a whole. And thus give them the chance to change their word choice.

This looks great! A humble request: a more button that I can press to sign up for an email when a language I seek gets added.

Super cool that you've got Dutch as well! I make https://hetnederlands.com, would be happy to do a link exchange or something like that. Feel free to get in touch lars@hetnederlands.com

Would love to see a way to understand the english equivalent of each word. As it stands now you aren't really expanding your vocab if you are just listening and copying what they say without knowing the word's meaning.

Nice, tried it. Looks cool. On the phone the drag and drop is a bit tricky. Dropped a wrong word and it got score emediatly as wrong, even though I was going to fix it. I expected scoring to happen after I click "submit". But maybe that's the same in Duolingo, no idea.

first screen is 'Select a language' - maybe good to make clear if that's your own language, or your target learning language

I tried Japanese; the Youtube video that autoplayed had its timing slightly off so that instead of saying あたまも疲れました I only heard まも疲れました. It was pretty confusing but fortunately the answer was displayed right in the video because the video itself had its text spelled out.

https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8v909oq00fj9x1kztl1ez...

I think one other point to consider in the content filtering: One of the first examples that was shown to me had in-video subtitles, which made the exercise too trivial, as the answers were essentially given away.

I absolutely love the idea. I would honestly use this. However, when I tried the English learning, it incorrectly marked words wrong several times. Something to check out.

I love having real sentences -- so much more engaging than the random things made up by Duolingo!

What are your long-term plans with this? I'd love at some point to be able to combine something like this with an algorithm I'm working on called Guided Immersion.

Basically, the system tracks what words you know and don't know, and so could tell you how hard a given sentence is for you. And it also tracks what words it would be useful to review and/or learn (spaced repetition and frequency analysis), to tell you how valuable a sentence would be for you.

The algorithm is generic and can be adapted to any language; right now it's been adapted to Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and New Testament Greek. (Which unfortunately so far doesn't seem to overlap with any of your available languages.) I'm working on an API to allow any content providers to use the algorithm.

Adding this to your system could help focus the content you're showing people to things that they're likely to be able to understand without having to look up most words, and helping them incrementally grow and solidify their vocabulary using the built-in spaced repetition.

Drop me a line if you want to chat at some point -- my email is in my about.

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.

Really cool idea! I tried a few Spanish ones (I speak Spanish) and unfortunately it was marking things as incorrectly wrong on 2/5 videos I did!

I tried the japanese one, as an A1, I can't read/don't know kanji yet, would be nice to have an option to see katakana/hiragana only, an option to have furigana and an option to see the kanji. Also would like an option to save phrases and not just a word. but likes it overall

Hey, this looks really nice and worked like a breeze for French!

Question: out of the processing steps you mention - transcription, quality filtering, segment selection, and (I guess) wrong-word selection) are there any truly manual steps? Those would be the ones that prevent you from building this for just about any language that has good transcription available, right?

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.

It looks great - nice work. I tried the french example and found it challenging and useful - a great addition to my duo lingo practice. So much so that I signed up. But in doing so I lost the credits that Id apparently acquired by completing the example which was a little disappointing. I hadnt seen the Easy French videos before - they look nice too.

I am a audio-visual learner and on Duolingo, which I am currently using to learn Spanish, my biggest problem is, that I have not a real visual for the words. Sure sometimes you get a picture for single substantives, but learning via video and watching mouth movements is so much better for me.

So this is a welcome tool I am definitively gonna check out.

It seems we either ate all your LLM credits or knocked your server over since the spinner just spins (checking dev tools coughs up that https://app.fluentsubs.com/api/exercises/daily?language=fr is 504)

After 4 retries, the spinner finally gave up but it incorrectly said "Sorry, no exercise available for this language today." and not, as it should have, "We were unable to load the exercises. Try again later, or contact support at ${email}"

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The AppSec-er in me wants to point out that returning the version of nginx that you're using is an antipattern since it enables more targeted attacks if the version has woes; it does it in the error, and it does it in the headers

As a resident Duolingo apologist this is certainly awesome! I appreciate how little landing-page fluff there was before I could give it a shot. I tried Japanese and felt it was only reasonable in tandem with my in-built translation extension, since Kanji-reading knowledge itself is a major hurdle of learning. Furigana would really help this, but personally, being able to translate the words I pick helps a lot during the challenge of hearing new vocabulary in native Japanese.

As well, I am learning multiple languages, and noticed that the settings panel seems to be the way to switch between them. I think it's a little unnatural to force a user to do this, but if there's an intention for bookmarking languages of interest for separate collections of videos & transcription exercises I can say I'd be happy to pay, honestly. The pricing itself seems reasonable and I appreciate that I can feel the app out for free.

Interesting project!

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!

Nice work. A similar concept with songs, I guess it was called lyricstraining.com earlier:

https://lingoclip.com/

Any timeline for other languages? Would very much like to see Greek. Alvast bedankt ;)

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.

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!

That’s cool. I managed to guess several sentences without even watching videos.

This is amazing! Definitely going to use this during my German study!

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?

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?

Cool idea! I tried French with manual input. How do I move on, there is no button to advance.

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?

Have you seen Mauril for English-French training?

https://mauril.ca/en/

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.

Don't autoplay in a loop it's very annoying. With that gone, it will be fun. Remove drag and drop.

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

could u add euro portuguese please? ive seen many euro portugues language models. ive been meaning to learn but most are brazilian

Suggest to get rid of drag and drop for multi choice or something else. Tried doing on mobile and it’s a bit difficult.

I absolutely love this - one thought, clicking the words should auto drop them into the first open spot.

This is a great idea! Anyway to stop the videos from constantly replaying while filling the gaps?

Looks promising, please let me know if you're able to add Swedish or if that's on a roadmap.

For some reason, probably my corporate firewall, this is blocked by certificate errors for me.

This is very good, thank you.

Love the idea! Any chance you could get Mandarin?

Looks cool! Unfortunately, the buttons are unresponsive on Firefox :/

The signup confirmation email has awstrack.me tracking in it :(

i'm loving it! added it to my daily tasks now!

I'm getting "Failed to load video player"

I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo. It has brought me from zero to scoring 96% on this test – I didn’t realise I was so advanced!

I love the concept and the execution. This is a rare instance of a Show HN that I not just admire, but can easily see myself using regularly and paying for.

Please, please monetise this in such a way as to avoid enshittification.

Initial reactions.

1) Let us keep the right sidebar permanently out, and DON'T grey out the rest of the screen. I want to be able to click on target language words and immediately see them. Like, you've given us the translated sentence, but I can't see which word is which;

2) Colour _the same words_ in both languages when doing mouseover;

3) Or just highlight BOTH as we're listening [but note issue below!];

4) Make the keyboard use a bit more intuitive - i.e. left/right obviously means "go back or forward in the video/audio", but now I have to CLICK on the yt video again to get that behavior. It should be auto so I don't have to do that. Similarly, I want to click on a word to know it's meaning, but then go back to space->pause behavior. Rn clicking a word breaks that. Just adds friction to users.

5) Consider yt-dlp to save the videos so if we are studying one, and yt pulls it, we can keep using. Maybe for the roadmap.

6) Consider allowing us to add words to vocab -- and which vocab -- directly from mouseover [without clogging up UI - not sure there]. Right now it's a bit convoluted [right sidebar, which again should be permanent and integrated, not greying out the main screen - but even if that was fixed, that's a lot of mouse movement]

6) Handle idiomatic language issues better. You'll probably need another LLM pass/method for this, but IT'S a BIG ONE! Languages don't map 1:1 obviously, so for example this one:

https://app.fluentsubs.com/stream?v=cm8mnqrqe084ervb0mi6a4sa...

"genommen" was translated as "taken" <- means nothing.

I dump into 4o and it explains

In the phrase „genau genommen“, the word „genommen“ is part of a fixed idiomatic expression and doesn't translate literally as "taken."

„Genau genommen“ means "strictly speaking" or "to be precise."

So the full sentence:

„Wir sind heute wieder auf der Straße unterwegs, genau genommen auf dem Flohmarkt…“

translates to:

"Today we're out on the street again — strictly speaking, at the flea market…"

It’s specifying or narrowing down what “on the street” means in this context.

**

So you'll need to pull out these idiomatic phrases and then make sure they can be analysed as a single unit, so to speak. Learners are gonna have to be acquainted with those, and now the workflow is obviously broken.

Basically just get a model to bundle them and then in the sidebar on the right that has like "drill into X" you've got the PHRASE as a unit of analysis.

This is nice!

It's a shame the news is so depressing.

Is this in some way related to youglish?

This is a great idea. Nice job!

Amazing, this is really awesome

love it! Just wanted to share my support.

I tried the japanese version. I like that you are using real Japanese language YouTube videos. You can see the kanji on the videos though so it kind of defeated the point. Hide the video? Great idea though and very fun too.

I tried the Polish and it told me sorry, no news today. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you hand-pick the videos? My first one was some Elon Musk conspiracy dumpster and the second one some church “morality” thing… I think it’s a good example of what not to do with LLMs.

Also, your page needs to disclose any content filtered by or generated by a model.

The English icon has the Union Jack flag rather than the US flag, so it automatically elevates the service above Duolingo for me.

Will give it a shot if you add Mandarin/simplified or swahili.

Clearly I’m in the minority, but I found the idea awful. The execution on the exercises is good—I especially like that you mix similarly sounding words—but my first thought as soon as I read your description was that the news are a terrible, worrying choice which could be misused to push a specific agenda on learners. Lo and behold, first thing I try is Musk’s dad calling people bums. Learners shouldn’t be subjected to polarised opinions at the same time they are trying to internalise words. Use instead some neutral science channels like Veritasium, CGP Grey, or Vsauce.