alt Hacker NewsShow HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
I've been learning Japanese for a few years and kept running into a similar problem. I'd find a video I wanted to learn from, hear a useful sentence, and then realise that turning that sentence into something I could study later was both time consuming and draining at times.
I would end up jumping between a video player, subtitles/transcription, a dictionary, screenshots, audio clips and Anki. So I built SubSmith to bring that workflow together.
You can drop a video or audio file into it, generate a transcript locally and then use the transcript alongside the media to:
* look up words and sentences * replay individual lines * edit the transcript * save useful sentences with their original context/audio * export them as Anki cards
The important part for me is that it works with your own media. It isn't tied to a particular streaming service or library, so I can use the random anime episode, podcast, lecture, etc. that I'm actually interested in studying.
It's an offline-first desktop app, and transcription happens locally rather than sending the media to a transcription API.
I'm sharing it here because I'm now more interested in finding out where this workflow breaks down for other people rather than adding features randomly now that I have solid core/base.
For example:
* Would you actually save sentences from your own media? * Which part of this process feels like too much work? * Does having the audio/context attached make creating an Anki card more useful? * Would you prefer this to work inside your existing video player/browser? * Is installing a desktop app a significant barrier? * And does requiring an account before starting the free trial make you give up?
The current version does require an account to start the trial, and I'm trying to work out whether that's meaningful friction for the people who would actually use this.
It's free to try, and I'd particularly appreciate feedback from people who already learn languages through their own videos, anime, films, podcasts or other media.
I'm the developer, so I'll be around in the comments to answer questions and discuss how it works.
Comments
Cool idea!
While I'm not so sure about learning a language with content from fictional sources, that should at least make it more relevant for the learners.
And you can use it on podcasts too, where people talk normally.
The biggest hurdle is probably that users need to get hold of the media so they can use it as input.
I've been somewhat studying Japanese for... quite a few years now. I have yet to find the "ideal" method, but I know it must be mobile (I'm continually migrating away from sitting in front of my laptop) and something I can randomly get in and out of at any time (anything taking up dedicated batches of time eventually gets dropped or barely touched).
I've been building something similar but targeted at bringing content that interests you to your level: https://katarineko.com.
I've been learning Japanese as well and the content at my level is boring while the content I'm interested in is a wall.
I build the exact same system, but for (mandarin, simplified) Chinese which i'm learning. Wanted to create such a system for a while, but it's a lot of hooking up the correct libs and making a UI etc. never found the energy. Thanks to 'ai' I was able to do this finally, think more people needed this push :-) It's web-based and can be self-hosted in a docker.
This is really cool idea. But don't you think taking material and saving specific sentences may add unnecessary mental pressure to the process of learning which is said is ideal when the student is in a playful mood?
I love having auto-generated subtitles available, but I am still skeptical that we can call them "accurate" yet. For many languages the models are quite weak, and even for English and German on YouTube I see errors all the time.
Been a pretty happy user of https://www.languagereactor.com
Not seeing a reason to switch atm tbh
>Drop any file. Get accurate subtitles.
This is my main issue with tools like these. Automated subtitles are inherently inaccurate, because much of language depends on context which you cannot get just from a brief snippet of something. This wouldn't be much of an issue if the tool was targeted at people dedicated to creating subtitles, but if you're trying to learn a new language, how are you supposed to know when the output is wrong or not?
> I'd find a video I wanted to learn from, hear a useful sentence, and then realise that turning that sentence into something I could study later was both time consuming and draining at times.
How does not study a sentence? You mean memorizing it later?
In the age of LLMs, AI assisted programing and vibe coding can't this all be replicated?
I'm confused why is this a yearly subscription or paid at all?
This tool might as well be open source to be brutally honest.
I've been learning Japanese for just over a year now, and its a community that might have the highest concentration of amazing free learning apps with sentence mining capabilities, many of which do things very similarly to what you're building. Have you tried some of these?
asbplayer Manatan Yomine Anki Miner AnimeCards Nagare
These are just for video, there are other similar solutions for games, manga and ebooks, and some of them are all in one