TL;DR: I built a web app called LangGlitch that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos (and soon podcasts/graded readers) for multiple languages, starting with German, Vietnamese, and English. I want it to become a one‑stop place for comprehensible input for every language, including small/obscure ones, and would love your feedback and language requests.

Hey folks, I’m Stefan, a guy from Germany who loves travelling and getting lost in new cultures and languages. In school I was terrible at languages and grammar never really made sense to me, but at some point I realised I had somehow become fluent in English just by playing games and watching YouTube in English.

Looking back, what worked for me was basically “comprehensible input”: content that I mostly understood and actually cared about, consumed for fun rather than as “study”. These days I always try to learn new languages that way, but I kept running into the same problem: unless you’re learning something huge like Spanish or Japanese, good comprehensible‑input content is scattered and hard to find.

So I decided to build something for myself and ended up turning it into a proper project: LangGlitch – a little web app that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos for language learners. Right now it supports German, Vietnamese, and English, with playlists grouped by difficulty, tags, and creators. You can sort for “easiest”, filter for topics you like, and then just watch your way through material instead of hunting for the next decent video.

I’d love for LangGlitch to eventually cover every language out there, including the really small and “obscure” ones, so it can be a genuine one‑stop place for comprehensible input. If there’s a language you’re passionate about and want to see added sooner rather than later, tell me in the comments or message me and I’ll do my best to prioritise it.

I’ve just put it into free open beta, so anyone can sign up and play around with it. I’m planning to add more languages over time, plus podcasts and graded readers, and if it ever makes enough money to pay its own bills I’d love to commission new comprehensible‑input content for underrepresented languages as well.

If you try it, I’d really appreciate honest feedback: confusing UI, missing features, annoying bugs, anything. You can leave comments here, DM me, or join the Discord (linked on the site) and yell at me there. Screenshots in the comments so you can get a feel for how it looks.

  • LangGlitch@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    Another musing, might be nice to have videos from other sources too. PeerTube, Odysee, Vimeo, BilliBilli exist. Tiktok has some good stuff, for sure. I don’t think this is worth the trouble though, considering those first few have almost no content.

    I’m was thinking about this. I have to see which of these platforms allow embedding. I know TikTok does & BilliBilli doesn’t but no idea about the rest.

    Rankings - my thinking was a few tags could maybe show under the video when browsing. Or searching by tag could return ones where the tag is most relevant.

    I like this in general. I decided against the first point because it kinda overloads the UI a bit. Maybe if I find someone who can help me with design I can revisit this. The last part sounds like something I should do. Like ordering the Videos that have the tag by relevance sounds like a decent Idea.

    Glad to hear the tags are human added. LLM only approach would scale better, but produce silly nonsense sometimes and make the site less fun. I do think if you have any LLM generated content (titles and description) that’s user facing, that should probably be disclosed somewhere in an About or FAQ page.

    Well yea a pure LLM approach would be for sure faster & scale easier but you just can’t trust AI output enough so you need supervision. I actually tried to get a general sense of the difficulty based on LLM output but that took me nowhere so I had to revert back to do it manually. Most of the time I use the Difficulty the Creator has set but a lot of the times there is no difficulty anywhere & thats where I have to evaluate it myself. This is actually the hardest part because I don’t speak a lot of the languages so I’m depended on friends helping me out there.

    For the difficulty though, that can probably use some input from automation (not even necessarily LLM, just good old fashioned code) - might not be too hard to figure out words per minute, % of common words, etc from the transcript and run time. But difficulty values from the channel that created it are probably more accurate, and I imagine most of them say what they’re targeting. And analysis wouldn’t capture things like visual aids.

    This is actually harder than you would think. I had the same Idea after my LLM approach & it turns out this is hard as shit. Even linguists that studied a language struggle with this. Also getting data set’s for the most common words might be easy for English, Spanish, etc. but not for the more obscure/rare ones. In my research I found a service that offers this for English but it’s still mostly for written words TextInspector. Having a transcript of spoken words makes it even harder because there is no punctuation & spoken word is not always correct or uses slang. Like this whole topic is extremly complex & creating the Datasets could be a whole business by itself.

    Also I added a Watch Later feature. Feel free to check it out & tell me what you think about it.

    • emb@lemmy.world
      1·
      21 hours ago

      This is actually harder than you would think.

      That 100% makes sense. Anything involving language seems to have potential to be a rabbit hole problem.

      Also I added a Watch Later feature. Feel free to check it out & tell me what you think about it.

      That was quick! Looks good. I was a little surprised to see the ‘videos like this’ sidebar when going back to watch them, instead of the playlist sidebar (since these are accessed from playlist page). But I don’t necessarily dislike that either.

      Couple other things that I noticed while trying that: the ‘Superbeginner’ label feels hard to read, might need more contrast. When watching a video, the difficulty tag doesn’t seem to be anywhere. When browsing the video list, hovering over difficult expands and shows a number - but clicking still just goes to the video. When watching a video, tags aren’t clickable - I’d like to be able to click those to go to a search filtered by that tag. Creator is also not visible on the video player page, would be another good thing to be able to click.