Watch Netflix, learn a language 📺

Request for Product #3

In Request for Product, I pitch a product idea and break it down to a stupid simple V1.

Demo

If you want to skip right to the end - here’s a demo:

Getting to V1

The problem

Everyone knows the best way to learn a language is immersion.

In a perfect world, we’d all just move to another country for a few weeks, overcome the shame and get the hard part over with.

That’s not really a realistic option, so we’re stuck on our couches doing daily Duolingo exercises, learning how to say random things like Grandma brings the kids to kindergarten.

I’m sure she did, but it’s not very relevant, is it?

It feels too disconnected - the habit slowly fades away and before we know it we’re watching Netflix again.

Why not do both?

The idea

Learn a language by watching a foreign TV show.

Before you press play, you simply study the words of that episode with flashcards.

Because you're actually interested in the story, you're more inclined to pay attention to the words. The words also have a visual context - you can connect them to what's happening on the screen.

At least, that's my theory.

Audience

I have a few questions:

• Will the same words come back constantly, so you get bored of the flashcards?

• Can we recognize grammar/sentences and prep the listener for that?

• How high is the starting level?

This might just be too hard for a beginner.

Maybe it could, but you just need to categorize shows based on difficulty, so you can start with a kid's show.

The idea of watching shows in a foreign language is definitely not a new one - many language schools and experts talk about it online.

The video below does a pretty good breakdown too. Looks like movies & series are the best way to learn for advanced speakers.

This fella on the Duolingo forum sees it as a way to stay motivated when you've covered the basics.

Based on what I found, this tool might be helpful for:

People who are in the intermediate stage of learning a language, who have a hard time with progressing past this stage and learn the final 20% of 'niche' words.

The prototype

The flashcards themselves are key here, so that's the first thing to learn more about. I started with running some subtitles through GPT to see what it came up with:

For a prototype, I used this existing flashcard app called Anki to make the flashcards accessible.

Naël on my team has been learning Portuguese for a while, so he gave it a shot. Here’s his feedback":

That’s great - I’ll make sure the demo has:

• A difficulty option for users to choose what kind of words to focus on.

• A choice between words or sentences.

The demo

Using Bubble, LangChain & OpenAI, this demo took about 2.5 days to design & build. It’s a small enough starting point to run more experiments and add shows manually.

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If you like the idea, let me know - shoot me an email at mike@minimum.studio or a DM on X.

If you really like the idea, feel free to steal it and share the results ✌️