
Language Learning with Netflix extension - davidzweig
https://soranews24.com/2020/01/12/free-language-learning-with-netflix-extension-makes-studying-japanese-almost-too-easy/
======
davidzweig
Hi. Creator here. If someone from Netflix is reading this, we'd like to be in
contact (email in profile).

Hell, here's my 15 minutes. I'd be interested in a job with
electronics/software/mech engineering (ideally all three) in the
US/EU/Australia (I can work in these countries). Some info about me on this
post from earlier in the year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18809704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18809704)

~~~
oaprograms
The other LLN creator here. I am looking for someone to correspond with or
hang out with (in Europe), to conduct amateur inquiries into _alternative
approaches to AI algorithms_ (and perhaps discussing unusual interests such as
_lifespan extension and futurism_ ). ognjen.apic@gmail.com

------
ouchjars
Related tip if you won't/can't use this extension: Netflix shows normally have
many more subtitles available than you get shown (and sometimes audio tracks).
The selection you see depends on your interface language and locale.

For example, I can't use Spanish subtitles for one show
([https://i.imgur.com/BBWuuPs.png](https://i.imgur.com/BBWuuPs.png)) until I
change my interface language to Spanish
([https://i.imgur.com/bsyYJGR.png](https://i.imgur.com/bsyYJGR.png)).

~~~
skrebbel
I still can't get my head around how user hostile they made this. I mean, why?
I understand showing the most likely languages on top, but why hide content
that's available?

I have bilingual kids (Dutch and Danish, living in NL) and the amount of setup
we have to do each week to get and keep Danish audio for cartoons on Netflix
is pretty nuts.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
I don’t think it is malicious - many people are overwhelmed when presented
with more then a few choices, they are catering to that crowd.

~~~
Benjammer
I swear there's a subset of designers who are just blindly wrecking tons of
what we collectively as an industry know about UX. "Overwhelming the user with
too many options," or "Can't find the option I want" are both discoverability
issues that design needs to take accountability for. Hamstringing your product
by removing options because you don't know how to properly set up your
discoverability is just insane to me.

------
imjustsaying
In practice, the foreign subtitles do not line up with the foreign words as
well as the native subtitles line up with the native words. It took me years
to figure out why this was.

In a conversation I had with someone who knew the business, the new language
subtitles don't line up with the new language audio because the new language
subtitles are translated from the original language subtitles, not the new
language audio.

Why? This saves a step from someone having to rewatch the final new language
dialogue and transcribe the new language as it is exactly spoken. That step
can be skipped and the new language subtitles can still be translated from the
original language subtitles, although they will be quite off much of the time.

~~~
dharmon
For a language learner, shows where they match up are gold!

If anyone is studying Spanish, the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars
have audio that exactly matches the subtitles (Start Wars: La Guerra de los
Clones). Good show with a good mix of action / dialogue that I learned of
Spanish a lot while watching.

~~~
davidzweig
For Netflix shows, take a look here:
[http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html](http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html)

------
hrasyid
I think having subtitles in your native language can hurt learning because it
tends to be easier to just follow the subtitle than actually trying to
understand the target language. You can't read both at the same time.

But I agree that Netflix is a great resource for learning a foreign language.
I went from zero to being able to understand a normal TV show in the target
language in one year, mostly by watching children's videos in YouTube and
Netflix. In my opinion, what's more important is (1) the ability to
order/group videos by simplicity after filtering it by target language (even
children shows vary a lot in difficulty and for learning it's very important
to choose the right difficulty for you) and probably (2) the ability to slow
down the playback speed like YouTube.

~~~
axaxs
I agree. That said, my wife subtitles every movie which normally I don't care
about, except the subtitles are -wrong-. I don't know why they do that, it
seems rather innocent, but drives me crazy as an English speaker. It's usually
something not even so consequential..off the top of my head like replacing
'Time for dinner' with 'Time for supper'. Not an exact example, but it's
usually along these lines.

~~~
leokennis
It was said in a major Dutch newspaper last year that Netflix seriously
underpays/over pressures the translators:

[https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/06/07/ondertitelaars-
voelen-z...](https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/06/07/ondertitelaars-voelen-zich-
uitgeknepen-door-netflix-a3963027)

Basically in “the good old days” translating/subtitling was a serious job for
serious money. But it has been turned into almost a “work from home, gig
economy Mechanical Turk” thing.

And the quality obviously suffers.

~~~
ta999999171
I won't even try the shows whose trailers have the problem stated in this
thread.

It's blatantly obvious 3 seconds in. Very unprofessional.

------
androng
Watch in a foreign language with foreign audio to increase your listening
comprehension in the foreign language.

Only watch in your native language/subtitles if you want to comprehend the
plot more.

Source:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927148/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927148/)

~~~
tvanantwerp
I've been wanting to learn Chinese, but I'm not sure Chinese subtitles would
help that much compared to if I were learning a European language. Maybe if
the subtitles were in pinyin, but I don't know if that would even be an option
for a lot of media.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Watching Chinese TV shows with Chinese subtitles definitely helped me a lot,
not only because the subtitles gave me a second chance to get what I missed
(which is the same with other languages), but also because I could learn
characters for those words I could already recognise in speech.

------
Grue3
I can see several problems with this.

1\. Japanese subtitles are completely different from what is said in Japanese
dub. Subtitles are optimized for readability and use completely different
phrasing, or even terms (for example dub says クイーン ("queen"), sub says 女王
("jo-oh")).

2\. Japanese subtitles and English subtitles are also different, because many
lines have to be completely rephrased in order to express them in a (very
linguistically distant) language.

3\. The furigana (pronounciation hints) in these screenshots is not correct.
"困った" is "komatta" not "koma ta". "妻は" is "tsuma wa" not "tsuma ha". If only
they used ichi.moe's engine... (disclosure: I'm the author of ichi.moe).

~~~
yorwba
The way the "koma" is placed above 困っ makes me suspect they first tokenize the
text, get furigana for each segment (most tokenizers have this built-in) and
then derive the romaji without correctly handling the sokuon っ when it appears
just before a segmentation boundary. Usually it's represented in the
romanization by doubling the following consonant, but of course that doesn't
work if there's no following consonant because each token is treated as a
separate string. They do get it right for "erikku" where there's no
segmentation boundary.

~~~
LinguaBrowse
If they're having troubles with correct romaji transliteration (and even if
not, to be honest), I don't see why they don't just transliterate it in
furigana then. The source data of Tokeniser dictionaries such as NAIST JDIC
isn't even in romaji, so if they are using a proper tokeniser, then they're
actually doing an extra step and throwing away data to transform it into
romaji form.

~~~
yorwba
The feature is probably targeted at absolute beginners who don't even know
kana yet. The screenshot of the settings does show the option to select a
different transliteration, but romaji seem to be the default.

------
vaskebjorn
Also check out the lingq exporter [1] which works with Youtube as well. Does
something similar but also allows you to keep an inventory of your current
vocabulary on the lingq platform. I'm a huge fan.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lingq-
importer/eaa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lingq-
importer/eaanhanppiifopiabnfmhjbikjmeeale?hl=en)

~~~
personlurking
I looked into Lingq, watched a few short videos on it, and saw an interview
with the founder, but I'm still not sure I get it. The site is mainly a text-
based vocabulary acquisition tool, right?

~~~
vaskebjorn
Yes it is very far from intuitive (as a developer I can tell when uis are
designed solely by developers).

The way I think of it is this: you do all of your foreign language reading
through the app. Lingq keeps track of which words you have seen: when a new
one comes up it's highlighted in blue, when you define the word (mostly
automatic) it turns yellow. Once you mark a word as known it is no longer
highlighted.

There are SRS features built in, but I ignore them and just add words to anki
when I feel like I need to.

If you love reading it's a really great way to get language exposure. Since
looking up word definitions only requires a tap or click it enables you to
read above your level (like reading with training wheels on). And just seeing
a word over and over again in different contexts is a much better way to learn
than hammering away at flash cards. The import from netflix/youtube stuff as I
mentioned is great as well.

I also upload all of my own material (mostly ebooks) and ignore a lot of stuff
they have there.

------
wodenokoto
I see this littered all over the comments:

Subtitles are not transcripts. They don't match word for word, mainly due to
space and time constraints.

A lot of amateur subtitlers time the subtitle with the time of the spoken
word, making them almost unreadable. Long text that pop up for a short time
does not help convey meaning.

You want a short text, that anticipates what is being said. The reader of the
subtitle is after all watching a movie, and might have their eyes elsewhere -
They are not reading karaoke lyrics!

------
njacobs5074
I agree with the author's assessment that having the kanji, the furigana, and
the English is really helpful for learning.

But I couldn't help but notice that the the software didn't romanize 困った
correctly. It was "koma ta" when it really should have been "komatta".

And I wish I didn't have to use Chrome :|

~~~
roca
Request a Firefox version. It might not be hard to port.

~~~
kick
Yeah, you can basically automate WebExtensions porting. There used to be a
browser extension that did it for you.

------
Eliezer
I've wanted this literally for two decades. Thank you to the creators for
finally making it.

------
hellofunk
> When you’re starting out learning a language, sometimes you can’t quite
> catch what people are saying. They’re too fast, or they use words/grammar
> you’re unfamiliar with. Being able to see the subtitles and hear the
> dialogue and see the translation all at once is a dream come true.

I’ve tried this but the subtitles often use different wording than what is
spoken (when both are in same language) so it doesn’t work out well in
practice. Maybe depends on the language.

------
pen2l
An observation: in netflix, when you choose a foreign lang for the audio track
as well as subtitles... they don't match.

By this I mean, let's saying you're watching Orange is the New black... and
choose French audio and French subtitles. You would expect the subtitles to be
correspond with what you're hearing.... they don't!! Kind of absurd and
annoying. This is true across all shows it turns out.

~~~
davidzweig
You might find this helpful:
[http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html](http://languagelearningwithnetflix.com/catalogue.html)

"Netflix usually has good subtitles for the original language of a title, that
match the audio track. Subtitles often don't match the audio for dubbed audio.

The catalogue lists titles by their original language. It allows you to find
French films, to study French, and German films to study German etc. By using
one of the listed titles, you should have good subtitles that match the
audio."

------
officemonkey
My biggest problem with understanding french is being able to comprehend it at
speed. I'm much better understanding song lyrics (because they're often sung
much slower than speech.)

I just tried this with "A Very Secret Service" and It's immediately easier to
understand what is being said. I can see this becoming a very useful tool for
me.

------
gozzoo
As a strange coincidence youtube recomended me this [1] just after opening the
article:

[1] Alexandra Stepien - Netflix and chilll like a boss: How to learn languages
the lazy way - PG 2017
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5d9JS_fE6E&t=1220s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5d9JS_fE6E&t=1220s)

------
grizzles
I asked for this on HN a few weeks back.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853163)

I really hope it supports Hanyu Pinyin. So excited.

~~~
lordfrikk
It's not really what you asked for, but subtitles that you download from
websites like zimuku.com or zimuku.cn have dual language versions: separate
English and Chinese flag means the ZIP file contains separate language subs,
pirate flag means it has one set of subtitles containing both languages -
super useful if your video player doesn't support displaying more than one set
or you don't want subs at the top of the screen).

------
walterkrankheit
I guess this is most useful if you don't live in the country you want to learn
the language for. Native English speaker living in Germany here who speaks
fluent German, but still lives most of his life in English. Movies are a good
way to keep up language practice, but there's no way I'd want to dub "Marriage
Story" or whatever in German. There are plenty of German films on Netflix
which I can simply watch with CC German subs, if needed. At any rate, it's
still a cool idea, particularly if you lived in, say, Spain, but wanted to see
German subtitles.

------
knolax
Be warned that one of the worst ways to learn a language is through
translations. Most translations leave out a bunch of information because
between connotation, denotation, and grammatical correctness you can really
choose one or two of the above. That's in addition to the fact that most
translations are either produced by machines with no understanding of the
content or even of the complete grammar of the target/source languages, or
mechanical turk style low wage laborers with tight deadlines and questionable
knowledge of either languagr.

------
cm2012
Really cool tool. Honestly the catalogue sort alone on the site was useful for
finding which shows on Netflix even have Korean subtitles.

------
akavel
Can anyone recommend any movies and/or series for a _complete beginner
learning Chinese from duolingo_? I mean, ideally probably aimed at literally
early primary school kids... some animated series, or Tom Sawyer -alike, or a
drama about a lost puppy is what I brace for... even better if on youtube than
Netflix, but the latter is also acceptable...

~~~
jonatron
Try "Where are we going? Dad" on YouTube. Also HelloChinese is much better
than Duolingo in my opinion.

------
serf
What would be needed to make this off-line capable with supplied media? Just a
bunch of well-formatted SRT subtitle files?

Obviously some kind of lookup between languages too, but what i'm asking is :
is this just a fancy srt/language api parser?

I want to use this, but I don't use Netflix. It looks very cool.

~~~
asdko13roasi
Posted above as well but mpv user script that works offline:
[https://github.com/oltodosel/interSubs](https://github.com/oltodosel/interSubs)

------
mhdhn
A: this is fantastic. B: why don't all streaming services simply have a by-
language option? It's kind of a guaranteed "long tail" for any audio or audio-
video presentation: people who want hear language X language spoken.

~~~
cptwunderlich
You can search for a language on Netflix though, e.g., search for "Italian"
and it will show several tags next to "Explore titles related to", like
"Italian-languae Movies & TV".

------
tluyben2
Somewhat offtopic; I wish extensions would work on mobile browsers... I watch
Netflix on iOS or streaming from iOS to chromecast.

I see it is recently somewhat possible to run extensions on Android via a
custom Chrome install. Does that work well?

~~~
beatgammit
You can also use Firefox for Android, which has extensions. Android Preview is
much faster, but it doesn't have extension support yet.

------
z_open
This is nice, but all I really want is the ability to nicely see both English
and German subtitles simultaneously. This is overkill for me and requires me
to use chrome. Is anyone aware of a better solution for me?

~~~
aplaice
I second the mpv-based solution, as suggested by st1ck. If you prefer vlc, it
now (as of the beta 4.0.0)[0] also supports dual/secondary subtitles. Making
it work seems a bit fiddly: first you need to turn them on (under Tools >
Preferences > Subtitles/OSD > Dual Subtitles (at the very bottom) > Align —
change to anything but unset, and possibly also adjust offset). Then, when
playing a video, to select them for that video, you need to "Toggle secondary
subtitle control" with Ctrl+Shift+V (this means that the normal subtitle
control shortcuts like "v", "Alt+v" etc. now apply to the secondary subtitles)
and press "v" the right number of times to switch to the subtitles that you
want.

(Obviously vlc and mpv will only work for DRM-free videos, e.g. from youtube
or a DVD.)

If you were asking specifically about Netflix subtitles, there used to be an
open source NflxMultiSubs extension[1] for both Firefox and Chromium, but it
was broken by Netflix introducing changes to its video player and
discontinued. There is an active, open-source dual-captions[2] extension, but
it's for Chrome only. (However, since it's open source adapting it it for
Firefox should be straightforward.) Finally, as an alternative approach, you
could try a Firefox addon which allows loading arbitrary subtitles in the SRT
format to netflix,[3] and which might perhaps allow you to have both netflix's
subtitles and your own SRT ones at the same time.

[0]
[https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/NEWS#L30](https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/NEWS#L30)

[1]
[https://github.com/dannvix/NflxMultiSubs/](https://github.com/dannvix/NflxMultiSubs/)

[2] [https://github.com/mikesteele/dual-
captions](https://github.com/mikesteele/dual-captions)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-
srt-s...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-srt-subs/)

~~~
davidzweig
NflxMultiSubs is still working. I wrote a patch to fix it, and took over
maintence on Chrome.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nflxmultisubs-
netf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nflxmultisubs-netflix-
mul/pjhnilfooknlkdonmjnleaomamfehkli)

~~~
aplaice
> NflxMultiSubs is still working. I wrote a patch to fix it, and took over
> maintence on Chrome.

That's great! It's a shame that it's (apparently) no longer open source,
though obviously given the MIT license you're allowed to stop disclosing the
source.

------
MaxwellM
Ef yes! Been looking for this, can't wait to try it.

------
therealdrag0
There's a similar product for YouTube videos called www.fluentu.com. I used it
for French and thought it was great.

------
godmode2019
animelon.com was the first company I know of to do this sort of thing. They
went through an accelerator where I was working working.

------
yuvalbar84
This is just amazing. Thank you!

------
xwowsersx
Wow, this is very cool!

------
finneganscat
My girlfriend has dyslexia and subtitles are a problem for her to read
quickly. She would love an extension similar to this that “auto-dubs” by
having a synthesized voice that reads the subtitle content and overlays this
slightly louder than the original audio. Any ideas if something similar
exists?

