Wordwiz: Learn a Language While Surfing YouTube

Learning a language is hard. Even with apps like Duolingo that try their best to be engaging through all of their fun designs and features, many people still quickly lose the motivation to stay on those apps simply because at their core, the content they’re engaging with and learning from just isn’t interesting to them.

To address that, we created Wordwiz, a Chrome extension that helps you learn a language while watching Youtube videos. This way, you can stay motivated since you’re engaging with content that you’re actually interested.

The main features of Wordwiz include:
* Dual subtitles on Youtube videos, one in English and another in your target language, with translation of words available
* Vocab quizzes at the end of the videos based on words you’ve seen
* Progress tracking of word learning stats
* Quiz streaks and goal tracking
* Video recommendations of videos in the target language
* Dashboard of word learning, word mastery, and quiz stats

Now, there are other Youtube language learning browser extensions out there, however, those mainly focus on the dual captions as the primary learning mechanism, and do not offer quizzes, progress tracking, or similar reinforcement mechanisms.

Feature Overview

At the core of the extension is the dual subtitles, which are available on any video that has user-provided or auto-generated subtitles in English. Hovering over any word in the target language provides the English translation.

In addition, as the primary reinforcement mechanism, there are multiple choice vocabulary quizzes that periodically test you on words you’ve seen before until you’ve mastered them (mastery is considered getting the word right 3 consecutive times). Quizzes generally appear at the end of each video, though sometimes if you navigate away from the video before it ends the extension will check if you want to take quiz before you go.

Video recommendations in the target language are also available in the side, so you can be exposed to the culture of the target language.

Your progress on quiz count, daily quiz streak, and word mastery, is also tracked. with these stats visible in the extension dashboard.

You can also set your daily quiz goal (the amount of quizzes you need to take in a day to maintain your streak) and target language in the popup.

Our Impact

Our aim with this extension is to make a more engaging way to learn a language so that more people can be motivated to learn languages. This way, we can help more people achieve a better understanding of other cultures and their ways of thinking.

In our user testing, many were receptive and eager about our extension’s uses. Many users found our extension helpful for interests like listening to music in other languages, engaging with other cultures through recipe videos, and generally being more able to understand foreign entertainment that they’re interested in.

We hope to keep this extension available on the Chrome store for the near future so as many users as possible have the opportunity to use our product.

About Us

We are a group of Dartmouth undergraduate seniors majoring in CS.

Check Out Our Extension!

Chrome Store Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wordwiz-chrome-extension/hjfhhcnblfccehdpjcefelonjgighbgo