Loving Fluentflix so far

I just got an invite to fluentflix.com this morning and have been trying it out. The site is wonderful. It's based on a simple concept: transcripts for videos in Chinese already uploaded to YouTube, but with a ton of features on top of this. Each video has a dialogue below it (hanzi, pinyin and English translation) that scrolls over one sentence at a time, with a fast forward and rewind button to skip forward or back. When you hover the mouse over a word the video stops and the meaning of the word appears. If you decide that this is a word you want to learn then you click on it and add it to your list.

Later on when looking at your list, it also shows the video where the word comes from, and when you click on that you can hear the single section (a few seconds in length) where it appeared, on automatic repeat. That's my favourite feature so far. It also offers the ability to download them all as a pdf, with or without extra example sentences, and this then becomes your personal list of new vocabulary to focus on.

The site is well set up for other languages too (including the name), and hopefully we'll see those later on. The site owner has told me that they would like to do so, though no firm indications on when. I'm sure they are busy enough with a single language and working on too many projects in the beginning is always a recipe for disaster.

Apparently the public beta begins in a few days.