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Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

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Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#81

Post by zht »

polymatter wrote: post #17

Please don't use flags for disambiguating languages. ( http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-repres... ) is a starting point. Basically - some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India) - some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country) - you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wron…

but in this case it's about the written language and less about verbal dialects.

Chinese and Cantonese are representable by the same written language.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#82

Post by baby »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #66
baby wrote: post #30

This is how I learned english. I watched all the seasons of Friends and stopped at (almost) every lines to translate words I couldn't understand (and make a list). I also learned chinese this way, and let me tell you it is way more time consuming and exhausting since I had to draw every characters I didn't know to get the meaning. A solution like that for non-latin language would be awesome.

For Chinese, checkout http://chinese.yabla.com/ or http://fluentu.com/

Wow! This is truly awesome. Thanks a LOT for that. I know what I'm gonna do of my time these next weeks now.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#83

Post by Dewie »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #64
m4rkuskk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned English by watching Friends as well. However the thick german accent stayed. It's funny to see how many people in this post have learned english by watching Friends.

I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather th…

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough exposure to it. So if I want to adapt a new accent, it's more a question of imitating it until I do it organically - faking it till I make it.

Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#86

Post by jacalata »

Dewie wrote: post #83
jcampbell1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather th…

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough…

Yes, it is so hard. I am learning Hindi and I can't even hear the difference between several of the consonants, making it very difficult to measure how well I'm pronouncing them. My Chicago friends can't hear the difference when I say Kyle and Karl, so can't teach themselves to imitate it. And even if they could, changing pronunciation habits takes a lot of attention to the way you speak, which takes effort, which is basically the definition of hard. Its nice that its easy for you, but you should try thinking of it as a skill you have rather than sound like you think everyone else is just lazy.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#87

Post by w1ntermute »

mullr wrote: post #54

> Fleex shows you mixed subtitles, so you get the hard parts in your language and the easier parts in English. This seems like a Very Hard Problem. How did you approach it? Do you deal with polysemous words gracefully?

I'm not the author and I haven't tried the software (on account of not having a Windows machine handy), but I would use a word/collocation frequency list to hide sentences that only contain words/collocations that have a certain or greater frequency.

As for polysemous words, I would use contextual analysis to disambiguate as well as possible, and then just show the words that I couldn't disambiguate until the threshold for the least frequently encountered meaning has been passed.

Also, I would add a something to the UI to allow the user to, in one click, rewind the video by x seconds (not sure what the optimal value of x would be) and enable all subtitles until the point at which the video had been rewound.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#90

Post by adamzerner »

polymatter wrote: post #80
adamzerner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? Focus on the central point. DH6. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I'm sorry, I don't see how I'm disagreeing with an awesome Show HN. I was trying to provide feedback to improve UX. I like this, I want it to succeed, I personally know English teachers who can recommend it to their students.

The use of flags to disambiguate languages is a trivial point because it's impact on the success or failure of the idea is minimal.
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