Launching today
LangPanda
Learn languages from watching your favorite shows
120 followers
Learn languages from watching your favorite shows
120 followers
LangPanda helps you learn 36 languages by watching your favorite shows. Instant dictionary, flashcard creation, vocabulary tracking. 7-day free trial.
@chrislabonty Learning from shows you already want to watch solves the real problem with language apps: it's not the method, it's that people quit. You can't churn out of something you'd do for fun anyway. The spaced-repetition layer on top of native content is the smart combo. One thing I'd be curious about: does it pull vocab from what you actually watched, or from a fixed deck? The first is way harder but it's the whole magic, learning the words from your shows, not someone else's textbook. Upvoted.
@artem_fedorovich Hey Artem. Yes, I totally agree. I have been learning from shows, vlogs, movies for years and its actually very enjoyable. A lot of traditional apps can get boring quickly and usually don't get most people to a high enough level to actually understand native speakers. The sentences and vocab you add to your decks is from the content you choose yourself. I have tried shared decks before and they don't produce the same results as making your own deck. When you create your own cards from a show you watched, your brain has a strong memory to that scene making it much easier to remember. There is also a feature where you can "fork" other LangPanda learners cards (people can opt out of sharing their cards if they would like to). Appreciate the support!
This caught my eye because tokenization is the silent killer for that language group. Mandarin and Thai have no spaces, Japanese mixes three scripts in one sentence, Korean spacing rules are loose. Did you build the segmenter yourself or wrap something existing like jieba or MeCab? Great job!
@artstavenka1 Thank you. And you are spot on, that has been one of the big challenges as their is not a single library to handle all languages. The good thing is I am studying all those languages except Korean which I am just dabbling in.
For Japanese - kuromoji + IPADIC + custom rules
For Mandarin and Cantonese, custom lexicons + longest match scanner plus tone-aware pinyin/jyutping rendering on top (a few rare edge cases where pinyin may be off on a word, going to build rules to handle these edge cases).
Thai, Khmer, Lao, Myanmar - Intl.Segmenter as the base with extra logic to walk through clusters. Also some custom rules. Not 100% perfect, still working on improving this as I am studying Thai everyday
Korean - hangul-js + custom suffix-conjugation rules
This is cool! I studied languages (French and Italian) at uni and find the way that we learn languages fascinating. Learnt Mandarin at school too, which I found much harder to pick up much to Mrs Pan's dismay, so something like this would have really helped! Does it work with any video, do you just select a video and it adds subtitles?
@abi_church Hey, that is very cool. Mandarin really is a different beast. I have been learning Mandarin this way for over 2 years and it worked for me. Still learning more every day.
Right now, it works on YouTube videos that have subtitles and I am building out a big catalog especially of comprehensible input videos so people can find stuff at their level, very beginner all the way to native. Netflix and most other platforms usually have subs on pretty much every video. AI-generated subtitles for videos that don't have subs is coming soon.
I think situational learning is much more important. For example, I arrive in Mexico and go to a restaurant. I take photos of the menu, dishes, objects on the table, and so on, and it immediately shows me the names using real examples. That would be really cool to build - I would use something like that myself!
@natalia_iankovych There is an app called CapWords that does exactly that. LangPanda is focused on helping people understand native speech in a natural way and learning from real sentences / context through immersion.
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I'd love to see it in action! Do you have demo content? I couldn't find it on the home page.
@gurbax_ Hey Gurbax! There is not a demo account however there is a 7 day free trial so you can test it yourself. You can also access some of the extension and mobile app features for free.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
This is pretty cool IMO. If we could turn any content we consume and face to in every-day life into a language we wanna to learn, we would be native speakers soon!
@busmark_w_nika Thank you! I think learning from native content is one of the best ways to learn languages and its also enjoyable. I have been doing it almost every day for years.
This is actually a very cool idea. Most people already spend hours watching Netflix or YouTube, so turning that time into language learning makes a lot of sense. The vocabulary tracking feature looks especially useful for staying consistent without making learning feel like homework.
@alina_tyslenok_ Thank you and yeah it makes the passive watch time productive.