Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news

One more thing, just in general: Some people are complaining that some languages work better than others. This seems to be a common issue now with the availability of AI (both voice recognition and LLMs): there's a temptation to expand into as many languages as possible, simply because you can.

My advice would be to have languages default to an "alpha" state, and only progress them to "beta" and "1.0" state when they reach certain milestones, as defined by community feedback.

I've checked out the Japanese one, but I'd say that it's definitely no where near "real-world content" IMO. Just the usual tortuously slow-paced, artificially dumbed-down dialogue you'd expect out of classroom recordings.

Most of the videos also contain subtitles, which defeats the purpose of the exercises (you can disable the video manually though). Another issue is that some of the words are segmented very unnaturally (e.g. [み][ません]), so it's unclear how you're expected to fill them in.

In the end if what you really want is "real-world content", then you just need to go out there and find them yourselves - they're everywhere.

Great stuff!

Small UX thing: Make it so you can just click a word to fill in the next empty spot, instead of having to drag, similar to when building sentences in Duolingo. Especially when not on a touchscreen, having to drag is pretty painful and reduces accessibility.

This has a ton of potential! Keep going!

Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.

But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.

You can do it!

One minor but very nice aspect of the UX is that I was able to click the link and immediately try it out. I wasn't even planning to really use it but ended up completing a round. My only complaint is that the drag and drop is kind of annoying as the default selection process, clicking would feel more natural.

For comparison I tried doing the same with Duolingo and the UX is much, much worse. After multiple clicks and two noticeably long loading screens the first question I got was "How did you hear about Duolingo?" followed by a question about why I'm using the product. Blech! I wanted to try out the product, not help their marketing department.

This is great - I've actually started building something similar myself a few months ago.

Requests:

- Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America

- Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)

- Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)

This is so good! I've been looking for a tool that will simulate the "listen to the Spiderman movie 50x" experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eliB_y0fmSk and this site can do it!

I tried an exercise with Italian, but for some reason one of the words is not in the list to drag and drop ("qualcuno"), so I’m stuck: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1r2cv004m8v1pr775ko...

Edit: also tried in French, and it shows some words in red (I guess that means "invalid" -- please don’t convey information with color only) although they are correct: https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/cm8y1o6d5002s8v1p2h0m2f...

Just a quick note – the "Configure Your Exercise" step was a bit confusing. It took me a while to figure out what “Number of Gaps” even meant, since that’s not something I’d usually think about configuring.

Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.

Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.

Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.

Great idea, nice proof of concept. It'd be nice to see a translation into English after we finish the sentence, as it'll inevitably introduce words I don't known yet, and there's a learning opportunity.

The few UX things can make for a really frustrating experience. You don’t want to push away your users in their first testing.

1. Change the word “gaps” to “blanks” for English audiences. It fits the common phrase “fill in the blanks” better. And maybe call it that too.

2. Don’t make the blocks move around for the drag and drop. It makes for a frustratingly slow process to find where the word you were about to grab moved to.

3. Don’t just correct a wrong answer, show what the user chose. I had too many moments where I was convinced the answer was what I had selected. Even using the red/green doesn’t quite make sense if you’ve replaced an incorrect answer with a now correct answer.

3. Consider doing the check after all words have been dropped in so they can read the sentence as a whole. And thus give them the chance to change their word choice.

I just tried the Dutch (my native language) version, and it looks neat, but at some point it asked me to type Emmeloord, which is a small town in the Netherlands. That would be very challenging for someone learning the language without being relatively familiar with the Netherlands, so maybe you can tell the LLM to avoid names?