[https://www.axtongue.com](https://www.axtongue.com)
I’ve worked hard on it, and I hope you like it.
It solves several issues I’ve had with language education. I hated how you would get to the end of a language course and you still wouldn’t understand the language. It’s like you have to start all over at the end and teach yourself. Not only does this site bridge the insuperable gap between the textbook and the language itself, you can begin using this site as an absolute beginner. You may be a little slow in the beginning but your pace will pick up really quickly.
I found that, when learning a language, even if you had both the original text of something and the translation of it in front of you, even when you look up all the words, you still wouldn’t understand how the original text means what it does. The key principle behind this site is paired phrasal translations. When playing a video, the words from the original language subtitles light up like in karaoke, and when they’re highlighted, the words from the translated language subtitles that correspond to them light up as well. You can see how the phrases from the two texts match. Also, when a word is highlighted, supertitles above the video show the definition for the word, its (romaji) transcription, and various notes, like kanji explanations and grammar notes. Altogether, it’s a word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase, line-by-line, annotated translation, allowing you to understand a language without knowing it.
Not only do you not need to look up words, you don’t even need to pause the video and click on them to pull a dictionary. The definitions are just there.
Studying vocabulary and grammar in isolation still does not give you a sense for a language. What really works is experiencing the language ‘in the wild’ and piecing it together yourself, which this site allows you to do.
The material can be any YouTube video. Right now I’ve uploaded \~170 translations myself, mostly in Japanese to English. I’m going to continue working on translations, but I opened the site for user submissions so any video you like can be a learning opportunity.
There is a user-submitted tag system as well, which determines the recommended videos shown. This opens up an alternative to the YouTube algorithm, discovering videos by their related intrinsic features that users consider significant. This system makes it easy to create playlists. You can, for instance, highlight the tags “Music” and “Upbeat,” turn on autoplay, and let it run.
Thank you!
17 comments
Just took a look at it and it looks amazing! For everyone in need of a more immersive feature kind of thing, you’re website is the best. Looking forward to using it from now on.
This is a super cool concept and it seems to work really well! Thank you for this. Great job.
This is amazing. It’s also a frustration I’ve had that Japanese to English subtitles are often just kinda… vibes based. Which I understand but can be hard for learning.
>The key principle behind this site is paired phrasal translations. Whenplaying a video, the words from the original language subtitles light uplike in karaoke, and when they’re highlighted, the words from thetranslated language subtitles that correspond to them light up as well.
That is a dynamic approach! Who knew this would work so well. Sometimes Japanese subs are too difficult and English subs are useless IMHO; combined with your highlighting system puts the brain in overdrive. Impressive.
This would be great leveraging some of the fansubs for some dramas, movies and documentaries too. That might be difficult to implement but VLC has some nifty subtitle tools that might be leveraged.
For sure, the YouTube auto-generated subs would be a non-starter.
Very cool website. Kind of an aside observation, but wow, J-pop has really changed over the last 5 or 6 years, hasn’t it? That “TWICE” video looks just like K-pop. The Western influence is seeping.
Really great stuff here. Are you planning on monetizing this in a way more than donations, or is this just a cool thing you are making for the universe? Not being critical of it either way, but I do think that hard work like what you’ve put in here should be rewarded.
Arigato! You’re amazing!
You are a genius. This is amazing. Out of curiosity what is your tech stack?
I’m really going to utilize this site to start learning japanese when I finally get a new notebook for me. Nevertheless, thank you very much for helping people to learn a new language.
It’s a really cool tool, and I appreciate anyone working on simplifying the transcription process!
That being said…
> It seems to me that, once there are enough translations, it should be the only resource people need to become fluent in a given language.
I’d avoid statements like that, because it kind of sounds like the immersion culty thing of not ever speaking to another person before being “fluent.” I don’t think that’s a healthy way to learn a language!
~~edit: Oh, I read your about page. It’s just that you’re considering “language in”-only as fluency… ? So learning purely for consumption, not communication? I think I can understand that but it’s still advisable to try to make your platform neutral, especially on this point, if you’re wanting contributions from all kinds of people!~~
Edit2: Thanks for taking in the feedback about neutrality. Good luck!
Thank you for this.
Wow, this is a great approach and I really appreciate the work that you put into this!!
Nice tool, useful for karaoke. Only problem I have right now however, when I click to hide translation, it only hides like 80% of the words, and the blue box navigating the hidden words is still visible.
Woah man this is super cool and useful! Thanks a lot for making this!
Cool
Is the site down? I’m getting a ‘502 bad gateway’ error. Seems like a great concept from your post though!
Comments are glowing, but the site is down right now sadly. What are you using to host it?