http://www.fluentu.com/

FluentU is a free website that has collected videos (youtube, commerical, news, etc) they felt was best to learn from and categorized it by levels. The languages provided are Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, English and German.

Here is a quick video of how the site works

http://youtu.be/YQCYkmcbbH8

I just signed up for the site today and I like the concept a lot. The fact that the subs are interactive where you can just have a popup definition when you hover over words and create a vocab list. Of course there are other features but I'll let the video and website present the rest.

I checked them out a bit. I wish their videos were longer, but I think the short length is good for the beginner stage.

It's a great concept, and I like the interface. This could really kick ass if they managed to license and use commercial content, such as select anime and dramas. I've always wished Crunchyroll would do this; I would totally use "CrunchyRollU".

(Anyone from Crunchyroll listening? No? Damn.)

The site's vocabulary management was not complete for me back then in their beta testing. There was no spaced repetition and I could only sort words by "Fluency", manually select the least (/most) recognized words and then I let me through the quiz. Also there was a Learn all mode, but I didn't used that much.
I couldn't reset words' stats, but I can mark them as learned.

I am using an another website, an their "related words" popup when you click on a single hanzi is invaluable. I don't know if this site has already implemented this.

The site's admin was very responsive and he really tailored his website according to the users' feedback. ... And then the ~$20/month subscription plan appeared.

agreed! I wish they used longer videos as well.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:I've always wished Crunchyroll would do this; I would totally use "CrunchyRollU".

(Anyone from Crunchyroll listening? No? Damn.)

lol I love the name xD the concept would be amazing for Crunchyroll

@xfact2007: I haven't really ventured the website long enough so I don't know about the vocab section. Even so, I'll most likely just copy the vocab and example sentences onto Anki anyways.

Also what is the other website called?

This is great listening practice. I like that it's graded and has subtitles so I can easily put new words into anki.

Thanks for sharing!

They posted some videos for Japanese, like this one:

They sound a little like like a Rosetta Stone clone you would play to drive someone nuts...Hopefully the videos on the site itself are better. I could see it being very useful for intermediates, if it's like in the video RawrPk posted.

@ariariari: No problem. I'm also working on my listening skills. My reading and writing are imo lower intermediate but my listening and speaking are falling behind. Since speaking in Japanese makes me nervous, I thought if I improve my listening first, then I might have the courage to eventually tackle speaking. Baby steps.

@Bokusenou: omg no! lol xD that video gives me the shivers...in a bad way :0

It's more like the video I linked. This might be a better comparison. Here is an original youtube video link they have in their Advanced category.

And here is the screenshot of the same video in FluentU.
http://screenshot.net/vkjqlfr

The furigana being displayed on the bottom is weird and sometimes doesn't align with the word/kanji. I hope the developers fix that :/

Impressive site. It has all the right things in one place: native subs, hover-dictionary, subs to SRS function (hope it'll be more than just words), some premade decks, the known-word personalization... Would have been cool to have as a beginner (compared to having the pain of setting up various softwares). This could become pretty big once they have enough good/fun/interesting content.