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

> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already

I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.

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" 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.

I mostly meant that facetiously as now we're entering the linguistic quagmire of trying to pin down an exact origin for a language, and furthermore (depending on your chosen definition of "English") the language itself predates the current flag of England, so even that is open to debate regarding its appropriateness.

The moral is: don't try to draw boxes around languages.

All that said, I do understand why someone would want to use flags as shorthand for language. It's wrong, but it's useful.

Thanks for the feedback! It is indeed a PoC that I'm hacking together after work.

I've been working hard to get the quality up. And now that I have some paid users for the large languages I can also auto-transcribe high quality channels. Main reason for the poor exercises (especially for German) was that I initially picked some poor channels and I was being cheap.

I've updated the german channel and that should hopefully result in a better experience.