LingoLingo
Language Learning with YouTube#
LingoLingo is my current passion project and combines many of my interests: language learning, user interfaces, data mining and thoughtful AI integration grounded in real-world data.
Origin#
I don’t know how far the original idea dates back, but I remember some 15 years ago I was heavily into flashcards for learning Mandarin. I would save new words that I encountered and add them to a flashcards app on my phone. The spaced repetition afforded by these apps was super effective for me.
One reoccuring pain point was adding context to flashcards, to remind me where I encountered a word and how it was used. I remember watching Chinese videos on my laptop and taking photos of the screen using my phone, to at least have a still image as a reminder. This was of course cumbersome and time-consuming, but there simply wasn’t any tool that made this easier. And personally I was nowhere near of being able to create a tool like this myself.
Browser Extension#
My initial idea was capturing video snippets and embedding them into flashcards. This is easier in the browser, since the YouTube player is implemented as a HTMLVideoElement, which can be used with a MediaRecorder object to save the actual video stream.
The video snippet is then persisted locally, with the option to either export your cards to the flashcard app Anki, or studying the cards in the extension.
I used the WXT framework to write the extension and posted it to reddit, where it received positive feedback, which inspired me to develop this idea further.
More info coming soon!