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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

#113
Great idea, I just have one question, how will you make money? You have a great idea which I could use, and I'd hate to see it go away...

As an English teacher (9 years experience) from an IT background (25 odd years, but not all of it active), here are a couple of ideas I thought you might like to look at:

1: Hook it up to a lesson planning system. I use videos a lot in my classes, and also try to set them for homework. Currently I use TED.com, as their older videos have full text transcripts available (the feature where you can click on a word and it takes you directly to the point in the video they say it is priceless), as well as subtitles in various languages. Think of a way a teacher could set up a simple worksheet (PDF or online) for students to use with the video. This worksheet could include pre-watching questions, including pre-teaching of difficult language that may come up in the video, and then some language activities to do after watching to reinforce anything they learn. Bonus points if you could hook this into an online learning platform such as moodle so that it would integrate with a language course. Set up social sharing in two areas, one for teachers to share lesson ideas based on vids, and one for students watching the vids and you basically could make your own video learning platform. English teachers have no money and are pretty badly paid, (I make my extra cash consulting, but I just love teaching) so you can't target teachers directly, but, make it free for individuals, build evangelists among them, then target schools and universities with extra features such as participation reporting, gradebooks, enhanced cryptographic security (the EU has pretty tough Data protection laws), institution branding and so on.

2: Integrate it with Hulu or Netflix, and make it a value add for both sides. Hulu or Netflix can add an extra "learn with us" feature, and people could choose to add it to certain shows either on an episode by episode basis or for whole seasons. Again add options for social integration, and, if you do point 1 from above, have 'featured' teachers who make lessons based on your platform and also get a cut of the pie. Conversely you could speak to rights holders and negotiate with them directly (e.g. I see a lot of people on this thread talking about "Friends", so more popular shows could garner higher rates for learning from them)

3: Building on points 1 and 2 above: segment your market - shows with legal or business vocabulary could charge more. Military shows (band of brothers etc) could be marketed to NATO etc, etc. Along with social you could integrate gamification, which I think would work well in this kind of situation, with the added benefit that you could work with language examining bodies to match your 'badges' with real world targets of language learning. Although good luck working with those arrogant assholes from Cambridge :)

4: No clear money with this idea, this is just for cool factor- do something similar to hiphop genius and crowd source language interpretations and meanings. They figured out how to get funding, so can you. (This actually would be really cool, as I can see linguists arguing with people who actually use the language :)

So I am an 'idea guy' and this doesn't fly on HN. But this time I feel that I finally have enough domain expertise to comment, and I am actually trying to implement some of these ideas at the moment, I just don't have the tech chops (or hardware to be honest) to deal with working with video on this scale. But I am working on language points (I have an idea about your 'secret sauce', but don't worry, your secret is safe with me Batman ;) as I am in the midst of running an online language course for an EU project at the moment and creating all the materials from scratch, by hand, and it is a pain!

I would love to chat with you guys if you are serious about making money from this, my email is in my profile (it's basically my HN username @ gmail). Meanwhile, I have over a hundred students who I need to email with a link to your site and I need to figure out how I can integrate your work with my axe (I mean my teaching :)

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

#114
post #62

I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it. There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and…

Oh if only watching tv was enough to get rid of the accent! As a dane, my accent at its worst sounds like someone making fun of a deaf person

I think it is dependent on which accent you have. In my experience as an american (who has met a lot of foreigners), I have found that germans and the dutch seem to have the least problem with the american accent. (Australians too, for a non-european example). There can be a number of reasons for this to be the case, but this is what I have noticed.

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

#116
post #113

Great idea, I just have one question, how will you make money? You have a great idea which I could use, and I'd hate to see it go away... As an English teacher (9 years experience) from an IT background (25 odd years, but not all of it active), here are a couple of ideas I thought you might like to look at: 1: Hook it up to a lesson planning system. I use videos a lot in my classes, and also try to set them for homew…

Nekopa,

These are all good ideas, that we've of course considered and been pondering for quite a while now. There are various difficulties associated with them, at various degrees. Personally I tend to think that in most cases, ideas are relatively cheap: finding the right way to implement them in a way that's highly scalable really is the hard part.

We can of course chat sometime this week - as a teacher, we'd of course love to hear what you have to say. Could you maybe send us an email (see our contact page) with your availability?

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

#117
post #61

I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it. There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and…

"Where did you learn English?" "College. And the Police Academy movies."

Did it watching cartoons when I was younger...

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

#118
post #44

Any idea if there's similar sites for different languages? I'm learning russian, but audio/video material with english (or finnish) subtitles is hard to find.

Russian here. AFAIK, there aren't many Russian movies with English subs, although I've seen some, like Russian version of Sherlock Holmes. At the same time there are loads of (pirated) American and British movies and TV series with both English and Russian audio tracks and subtitles, I could help you find them if you like.

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

#119
post #93

I want this for French. I couldn't even find TV shows in French with matching French subtitles. Any ideas where to look?

Arte TV is a french-german Television that broadcasts movies in both languages and with both subtitles (unfortunately teletext subs and not DVB subs). I've seen it on sat (i think on Astra 19.2) but they should have something also online.

In this precise moment they have problem on their site: http://www.arte.tv/ lol

EDIT: it's a cultural channel so don't expect to see Mission Impossible, many movies are self produced etc..

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

#120
post #111

Why is it Windows-only, since it’s based on VLC which is available on Windows/Mac OS/Linux/…?

We need the web plugin of VLC for fleex with the windowless mode. The plugin shipped with the 2.0.6 version of VLC works great on PC but have strong performance issues on the mac (in windowless mode). The VideoLAN team is working on it and as soon as this problem is fixed, fleex player will also be available for iOS. As for linux, we're just ignorant... We're looking for someone to package the app for us.
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