It would be cool (but super niche) to have a "wait, what was that" button in Netflix. Skip back 10s, enable subs. Would be great when you're trying not to use the subtitles, but sometimes get a bit outpaced.
Edit: maybe not so niche! Someone build a WebExtension!
You used to be able to pause Netflix, switch the subtitles (or turn them on), and it would update the subtitle language for the current frame.
Was nice when you couldn't understand the subtitle (slang that Google Translate doesn't know, for example). You'd switch to English for a second, go "aha", switch back, and resume video.
1-2 years ago Netflix introduced a regression where that feature doesn't work anymore. Now you have to go back and re-trigger the subtitles for the current frame for them to appear.
I think this is a big issue with voice-controlled UIs generally. People will certainly not try to say anything that comes to mind because they know the "assistant" is a machine with limited understanding of the world. But how do you allow them to discover what's possible, then? (I've never used one of these, so I don't know how this is being done today, if at all.)
I'd check if I wasn't 300 miles from my Apple TV :( I'm like 80% sure that this is the case, though–but it's possible that this specific feature isn't mentioned.
I just always have subs on. There are shows which are downright unwatchable without subs (e.g. True Detective). I'm not a native speaker, but I'm fluent.
Subs also add a lot of the plot sometimes. Certain quiet sounds you wouldn't otherwise hear are mentioned in the subs that can set a scene, foreshadow, or explain motives.
So, are those sounds really that quiet? I noticed this before, that sometimes subtitles mention a sound I haven't heard, but I always assumed it's due to my slightly impaired hearing. I wonder if this happens to people with good hearing as well.
Never came across this myself and have above average hearing...
One explanation might be if you're watching a 5.1 surround sound movie and playing it through your monitor's built-in speakers which can't handle the extra channels.
I ripped the bandaid off at an early age, actively trying to avoid subtitles. At some point it just becomes distracting where you're looking at them when you wouldn't need to.
The way I sometimes do it is by opening a transcript (springfieldspringfield.co.uk is a good website for those) in another tab. When I don't get something, I switch tabs and I search (via ctrl+f) for the last thing I've understood. This process is intentionally cumbersome to discourage me from doing that very often.
If it's a comedy, there's not going to be any sort of quiet sounds, so I keep the subs off. If it's an action that usually has gunshots way louder than dialogue, I'm going to adjust the volume to those gunshots and turn the subs on.
I'd love this. I think it's an overlooked use case but a common one. Happens to me all the time.
The closed captioning settings on a Roku player hint at something like that, but I'm not sure I've actually seen it work. Instead of just off and on, they have 4 settings: Off, On always, On replay, and On mute. (More details: https://support.roku.com/article/208756848-how-to-enable-clo...)
Another possible variation on this would be to just let you scroll back through subtitles without stopping the video. It would be nice to continue without breaking the flow, but maybe it would be confusing or weird for them to be out of sync.
One of the best features of PotPlayer [0] (available only on Windows, sadly) is that it supports jumping to previous/next subtitle points. Combined with its auto subtitle search feature, it's extremely useful for a nonnative speaker like me to jump back and read an unintelligible section of a movie, or skip a boring section by watching only the parts with dialogue.
I wish there were a similar alternative for Linux. The best media player I've found is VLC, which is a joke compared to PotPlayer in terms of customizability and UX.
I love PotPlayer. Pausing playback on minimize and auto playing URLs, Youtube included, after pressing ctrl+v in the main window is well beyond amazing.
https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com is a similar tool. Allows side-by-side subtitles in two languages. It also lets you skip back one whole sentence at a time to re-hear a line.
I used it to start trying to hear and parse Japanese (only about a month in of learning, so brand new, and just hearing the words and sounds of the language is still tricky).
It's also amazing. However, Mate is less intrusive in your Netflix experience. It's still the same-looking subtitle which you can just translate and save for learning now. Also, an option to export saved vocab as a CSV or to a vocabulary learning app Reji may come in handy.
Watching TV and movies with subtitles is a great way for intermediate language learners (B1 and above) to progress. Kudos to Mate for thinking of capturing this in Netflix with a browser add-on.
However, creating a flash card with a translation to your native language is not the best way to master vocabulary. A translation (or, "gloss") can be helpful initially, but it's more important to see the word in context.
It would be great if a browser extension would include spaced repetition / flash card creation of both production cards (sentence with a blank usually) and comprehension cards (the word alone) and pull up the original video frame for context whenever checking one's recall.
FD: I hold an MA in TESOL / applied linguistics / language acquisition, and I have several years' experience teaching ESL students. However, I am not yet fluent in my own second language (Russian). Working on that with the Fluent Forever methodology (though not their new app).
I think you are underestimating how effective flashcards can be, particularly as part of a larger system. I'm starting a 4-year PhD in September to develop a system that will gloss words (in text/subtitles in a variety of clients, like FF, ebook readers, media players, etc.) that aren't in your (Anki-compatible) flashcards. That means you get to read "normal" text, enriched with glosses only for words you don't know. The idea is basically to provide automated scaffolding at exactly the level the learner is currently at vocab-wise.
There is an extension to Anki that does what you suggest with the video frames (at least for Japanese?), and I want to integrate that (or similar) at some stage. But there are heaps of cool ideas to implement if you take the flashcard database as a first approximation of a representation of the learner's (lexical) knowledge of a language and then enrich real-world texts that the learner is interested in with enough help to appreciate the real-world content. The beauty with having a representation of the learner's knowledge is that you can take a number of different approaches (say depending on the % of unknown words) or even just let the learner decide how much help they want/need on a given content consumption session. With even a small number of users the data generated will also be pretty awesome for research purposes.
It's pretty clunky still (I haven't started the thesis yet) but it is all going to be completely open-source and I definitely hope I'm not the only one to contribute to it, so hopefully it will get some momentum at some stage, and there will be heaps of clients that can talk to the server part. https://transcrob.es
> Watching TV and movies with subtitles is a great way for intermediate language learners (B1 and above) to progress.
If they have patience, it's good for anyone. My children have been able to learn many languages this way from scratch to a very high level of fluency that I only minimally speak. I look for children's tv network apps for their iPad from countries with the target language.
Belgian here. Growing up, most of the stuff I watched on TV was either French or English (Belgian TV had little to offer at the time). There were no subtitles. I mamaged to pick up a good deal of French and a great deal of English in this way.
I think watching things in their original language is key. You pick up on things using context, some of which is lost in translation.
I've learned English the same way. A fair amount of people in my generation learned German the same way. It boiled down to which TV channels you had access to while you were a kid, and the lucky ones learned both.
As an adult, I have way less patience to stare at a screen and try picking up stuff that I don't understand. I've tried finding some Dutch shows with English subtitles, but it was shocking how little content I could find.
For me, watching TV shows with subtitles is an excellent way to learn a language, once you are beyond the basics.
I would watch the show with subtitles; when I didn't understand something, I would pause, look up the phrase/words, write them down for future repetition and continue.
I'm doing the opposite. I'm trying to learn Spanish so I'm currently rewatching Game of Thrones in Spanish, with English subtitles (delayed by 2 seconds). I first try to understand what's being said and if I don't then I glance down for assistance.
The subtitle delay is clever, I'll have to remember that. Although personally I would probably use subtitles in the target language (and use a dictionary if there's something I don't understand).
Sure, I do that as well. I guess it depends on your method of learning and/or current level. The downside to staring at subtitles in my mind is that you:
a) miss the acting (just keeping your left hemisphere glued to the text and trying to decipher it)
b) miss actually _hearing_ the language, which even if you don't even understand a word is useful since it will introduce you to the overall "sound" of it as well as a lot of repeating phrases
If you're learning how to read/write the language subtitles in that language seems like a great option. If you're starting out, it helps a lot to hear the language.
This approach is a bit tricky in Netflix, because they typically use different translations for the audio track and the subtitles. It can be more distracting than helpful. And kind of kills the "go back 10 seconds and temporarily turn on subtitles" technique that others have mentioned.
I did something similar for myself using mpv's scripting interface (for Japanese immersion).
I can press a button and have the current subtitle analyzed for words with mecab, or press another button and have audio + screenshot + text sent to Anki for review.
mpv allows to seek previous/next subtitle, so even relistening a particular phrase is really convenient.
Indeed, you get high quality in context cards, something that is still missing from most Anki decks.
The code is here https://github.com/pigoz/mpv-nihongo, keep in mind that a lot of stuff is hardcoded, poorly documented, and it requires an mpv patch to work.
If there's enough interest, I can try and make it simple for someone that's not me to use.
There is a streaming platform Rakuten Viki (quite popular among Korean drama lovers) which already has a language learning tools as a part of the product. I haven't used it personally because they are focusing on Korean, which is not my language choice, but it looked quite nice.
Also they have a subtitling community - any user can contribute to shows translation.
I am struggling to understand why Netflix is not thinking about that. It would greatly improve the experience and, probably, user base too.
Many years ago, I created BabelFrog, a chrome extension to to instantly displaying the translation for any highlighted text. Unlike other similar extensions, I don't have access to your pages until it's activated, slowing down your browsing or risk your privacy.
It's activated with a keyboard shortcut: Cmd-E or Ctrl-E.
Theres a ton of research on the impact of subtitles on literacy acquisition for kids.
We are currently running a project aiming to convince the major broadcasters to turn these on by default for kids TV. You can find out more on www.turnonthesubtitles.org
I’ve read that reading is involuntary to literate adults. Do you know anything about this?
This is such a great idea. In my experience, most people complain the subtitles are distracting because they can’t help but focus on them and read them.
This is exactly what learner readers should be doing in front of a screen.
This is generally a good way to immerse yourself in a language with content that actually interests you - now you don't have to maintain a separate window/notes/etc.
I really like the idea, and it looks well executed.
This is really fantastic! I have been looking for a good app for this for a while. It seems like there are several solutions for it, all emerging around the same time, which is great news for language learners!
Request: please add an option to not continue playing the video after I click "save". It is aggravating when there are several words that need to be saved at once and I have to pause the video quickly to get all of them.
You could also make the UI much smoother by copying the way the FluentU player works: pause the video and show a translation as soon as the user mouses over any subtitles. Unpause the video when they mouse away from the subtitles.
It would also be really helpful to have some contextual information saved with each word. The surrounding phrase would be helpful, for instance. It would be really fantastic to be able to save the screenshot (in low resolution to save space), but I understand if copyright prevents that somehow.
I really, really wish there were a more open solution for this. Has anyone else used LWT (Learning with Texts)? You could specify the dictionary API/URLs to use. (There were also really primitive word splitting regex settings, but I didn't find them very useful.) I want to be able to get more information on complicated words, from either compounding (German) or extensive morphology (Turkish). I want to be able to look up Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Thai words; these languages require extra processing to extract words because they don't separate words explicitly. When studying Japanese or Chinese, I want to be able to save characters for later study, not just words.
In general I really wish I could dig in and add functionality that I know I would love but I'm not confident that a large enough audience to warrant core app changes would need.
Just noticed, this also doesn't play well with NetflixMultiSubs (https://github.com/dannvix/NflxMultiSubs). I would like to be able to have multiple subtitles shown on the screen while studying.
One benefit of using a VPN was that Netflix provided shows with far more subtitle options in regions outside the USA. I never understood why if the subtitles existed for a particular language that they wouldn't be present in the USA version of Netflix. For example, now that you can't use a VPN with Netflix I haven't been able to access German subtitles from the USA. Is there a way around this?
I have been saying this forever, i have no clue why all subtitles are not available. When I was in italy all of my favorite shows had italian subtitles, now im back in the US, they disappeared.
Change your netflix app language to your target language and you magically get more subtitle options, if available. In US Netflix, when I set my language to english, I see english, spanish, and maybe french or italian for some shows. When I set my language to Korean, I see English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese (trad and simplified) when they are available for that show.
Why they base it on your display language and don't just have a setting that is "show me X, Y, and Z language subtitles if available", I don't know.
Had the same idea a while ago - only with "watching a series that you know already by heart". Unfortunately I soon found out that there is no spanish version of Start Trek TNG on Netflix/Amzn Prime.
( but I _so_ wanted to see Patrick Steward yelling "Señor Worf!" )
While my primary wish would still be something that targets novels ("Learn enough Italian to read Eco"), something similar for TV shows wouldn't be that bad. Preferably not a dubbed version, so that it's clearer that you've already got a benefit from learning what little you did. Problem is that a lot of TV shows are very much in the vernacular. I wouldn't recommend e.g. the Wire for ESL studies.
I learned a lot of my early English from reading tabletop RPGs, so I've got no problem learning about twelve kinds of polearms before I learn the words you need to get by in a hotel…
Anyone know of a "reader" app for books that does something similar?
(Totally getting this though---I might not be sold on the Netflix stuff but in general this plugin seems invaluable to me at this point in my Russian skills).
This doesn't solve the general problem, but take a look at http://paralleltext.io/ , where you can read/listen to a book in a different language and click on the text to see a translation.
You can look up words on the Kindle. And if you highlight them there are ways to access the highlighted sentences in a machine-friendly way (to i.e. export them to Anki).
This is fantastic. It would be great to use this to also train text-to-speech models replicating specific people by feeding unsubbed video clips of the same person into it, a la something like wave net [1], or what Google is doing with John Legend [2].
I could see there being use for something similar to this targeted towards children for expanding their vocabulary.
Similarly, how neat would it be to have a program that does this for object in video, and testing the viewer on the name of the object? Perhaps to avoid error as a result of imperfections in the neural net, it would require 2 parties, the learners and the teachers. The teachers would go through a video ahead of time with the video, making sure there are no errors, then that session would be saved and the teacher could play it back for the learners.
@ language learning: I wish there was a way to watch movies in various vocabulary difficulty levels. Would be awesome for learning. Makes me wonder whether there are fan-dubs with different wordings.
Kindle has this in eBooks, for English and Chinese. There's 3 or 4 difficulty levels. I'm just hoping they'll add more languages. (Or that there will be a free software solution...)
Would be cool to see more up front in the privacy policies/terms in conditions (or, source even) to get assurances that an app that can access all my browsing data is only doing so when I actively enable it (e.g., for the video I'm watching).
A friend of mine learned english this way with TV and closed-captioning. He said that without the CCs, he often couldn't figure out how the word was spelled sufficiently to look it up, no matter how clearly he heard it.
The extension also translates words and texts on any web page by double clicking or highlighting with the mouse. There‘s no way to do that without that permission.
It seems like this doesn't work with Japanese subtitles but works for some other languages. Am I doing something wrong? Is there some way to make it work?
Ah yes, I know of this problem. For whatever reason Netflix subtitles for a few Asian languages are images instead of text. Maybe because of font support? I'm not sure. But you basically have to run OCR on the downloaded subtitles for these languages.
Edit: maybe not so niche! Someone build a WebExtension!