Show HN: Kontext – Learn new words by watching movies in a foreign language (opens in new tab)

Most of you actually don't get it, so I will try to explain it without this marketing-ish language which I used on the landing page - obviously not very well.

Consider you already know English well enough to consume your favorite shows in the language. We all do this to maintain our knowledge, improve our understanding or pronunciation by listening, or just to hear the show in its original language.

Imagine you hear words and expressions, even full, shorter sentences which you don't understand. It doesn't really matter, because you understand the story as a whole, but you obviously miss an opportunity to learn new words. This is the moment when you can pick up your phone and press the bookmark icon next to the subtitle line, to get back to it later. That was scenario (use-case) A.

Or, you might not understand longer sentences, even complete dialogues for a few seconds. This is when you can use the app to see the translations for that actual part of the movie. That was scenario (use-case) B.

The app promises that it "helps you understand your show better and allows you to quickly save expressions you want to remember". It don't want you to learn a new language. Actually, it assumes that you know the language well enough to watch a movie in it.

It wants to help you to learn new words. Do you know why you don't learn new words easily after you reach a specific knowledge level? Because there are less and less of them, and you don't hear them again and again, and you don't recall them. This is how you learn new words in school when you start a foreign language.

So I started to build this app for myself to be able to grab new words out of kontext (do you see what I did here?), and re-read them later again until I finally learn them.

It's a cool idea, but unfortunately subtitles are notoriously inaccurate. Even in normal translations, you lose context and meaning due to cultural and structural differences in the language whose intents are difficult or even impossible to preserve. Add in the space and time constraints of subtitles, and you're basically forced to provide a bad translation of what's actually happening. This is especially true for poetry, lyrics, and jokes. And that's of course assuming that the translator is any good at it, or hasn't inserted politically motivated inaccuracies (most commonly with sexuality for translations to English). I've seen some HORRIBLY inaccurate subtitles and dubs, even by professionals (cough Akira cough), even to the point where the "translation" is a complete fabrication in some places.

Movies with subtitles are a nice aide, but to properly learn a language, you must learn it IN the language, WITH the attached culture.

I can't get it to load and the "about" isn't terribly informative, but (I think) I made a proof of concept of a similar thing. Mine is an offline video player that shows dual language subtitles. It has modes for skipping non-dialog sections, repeating the same dialog section, and slowing down playback.

What killed it, though, was a near impossibility of finding a movie that wasn't edited differently in each language (causing at least one of the audio track or language tracks to be out of sync or otherwise unmergeable). Maybe that was just an issue with Mandarin and other languages have better availability, but for me it ended up just being an endless swamp of comparing subtitle files to see if they were different, screwing around with time offsets, and eventually giving up. The player itself worked, albeit with a terrible UI, I just couldn't find more than a handful (OK, actually only one: Lost in Thailand) movies + dual sets of matching subtitle tracks to use it with.

If anybody has a solution to this I'd love to be able to use it again and even willing to post a cleaned up version if there is interest.

I also had vague thoughts of looking at the youtube API to see if there's a solution there for videos that already have multiple subtitle languages, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Cool app!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how useful it would be for language learning. I've been using the Fluent Forever approach and whenever I've dipped back into "translation" style methods like Duolingo it feels counterproductive, like I'm tying English words to Spanish words rather than creating a direct connection between the Spanish word and the object or concept that it represents.

I like the idea of subtitles in your target language while watching a show or movie in your target language but that's usually available without third party help.

I'd rather just watch content with proper subtitles in the language I'm trying to learn. Say I'm learning German, I could either watch some original movie in German with English subtitles, or watch an English movie with German subtitles. This problem seems already solved.

As someone who learned English purely from Hollywood movies, I can confirm its a solid way to learn a language. I even picked up the accent to the extent that I'm frequently asked if I'm American - even though I never lived in an English-speaking country.

It may not be for everyone though. The only reason why it worked for me is because I've seen so many US movies and TV shows. I started with subtitles and gradually moved to watching without them (though I had lots of difficulties understanding everything, especially in the beginning). I'd argue its a great way to learn the little language 'quirks', expressions, idioms, etc.

I'm getting https://i.imgur.com/NrcA5v6.png

Cool, I'll try this out later! Would be nice if you could convert the Chinese characters to Pinyin, which is far easier to learn

I guess it's broken? I picked Chinese, then Shutter Island, then at the "Start the movie now, then press start here." prompt the play button didn't do anything.

That said, I've found this implementation to be really great: https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/231829048-How-to-...

Although not all movies have all the extra subtitle work done to support learn mode.

The UX doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s totally separate from the movie itself, I have to click any one line to see a translation (which doesn’t mean I’d want to “save it), clicking a line doesn’t pause the actual movie which I had to start elsewhere... I’m failing to see how this is an effective language teaching tool.

I think there’s something there in leveraging movies/tv to teach language, as well as leveraging the existing subtitles. But it probably would need a deeper understanding of the languages themselves... for example being able to even map a given word to the translation versus an entire sentence (and perhaps being able to expand further).

That said, one of my best friends growing up learned English at age 11 by watching American TV. She was from Poland, and had no formal teaching. Several years later not only did she know English fluently, she has a perfect American accent. It helps that she was young and motivated (and really smart).

Cool stuff, I've had similar ideas but can never figure out the best approach to go about it. Just coming up with an approach that makes some kind of sense is an achievement in itself!

How do you go about syncing the subtitles? For huge films it's generally not a bother as the top subtitles will often be from the same source (and therefore follow similar formatting rules, if nothing else) but you can get pretty wide deviations when you get down to things with fewer subtitle options available.

I like the approach - might try it out - even i need to look at two screens at the same time ;) Maybe consider to have the app in a pop-out window, which I could overlay on my Netflix browser tab?

One thing I noticed, Query Strings contain the SRT filename, indicating the content could come from an unofficial, pirated source, such as "Se7en.1995.REMASTERED.1080p.BluRay.6CH.ShAaNiG.srt" ...

I guess you start the movie on Netflix and mute it, and then read the subtitles taken from 'Open Subtitles DB' The UI using a list is a bit jarring, I would prefer a smooth scoll, like a very large page scolling down, not a listbox populating.

"Find more movies in German" button not working as expected, takes you to a screen where you have to choose your language.

It's a pretty cool idea I think and is a great adjunct to traditional language learning. Maybe there could be an API so that open-source media players would be able to show the text on the screen together with the video. Hope you make it.

Wasn't able to figure out how it works. I guess you start the subtitles at the same time as the show/movie? --Not sure how I could possibly learn this way. I cant read Japanese, so what good is seeing Japanese subtitles?

I find it hilarious to put on a cheesy American comedy that I’ve seen before on the TV in a foreign language. I wouldn’t watch it actively but it’s something nice to have on while I clean up or do dishes.

The thought of building something like this has definitely crossed my mind while trying to learn Spanish. Looks cool, I will definitely try it out!

Great work! How does this work? Do you map the subtitle timings?