I just noticed this when watching a TED video: http://simpsonmedia.net/2009/07/ted-talk...o-feature/

This could be a useful format for combining subs2srs/transcripts (etc.) for reading practice. Maybe? ^_^

EX: http://www.ted.com/talks/olafur_eliasson...light.html (Click on 'open interactive transcript' to the right)

That's really cool. It would be an excellent way to practice reading Japanese if they have videos with Japanese audio as well.

What's new here?

I'm using a similar thing since 7 years. If you open the video and the subtitle file in the freeware Subtitle Workshop, you can click on any sentence to play the video from that point.

bodhisamaya Wrote:That's really cool. It would be an excellent way to practice reading Japanese if they have videos with Japanese audio as well.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is how to keep the protracted text/shadowing format for reading practice but incorporate the piecemeal flexibility that subtitles/video via subs2srs allows for. Because I'm not a fan of 'shadowing' per se, I prefer my usual method of reading, subvocalizing, then listening+speaking if I feel fuzzy on that. So you can have easier backlooping--to go back and re-read something w/ or w/o audio, or to read silently to yourself.

To take a transcript, or remove visible timecodes and reformat subs in a paragraph format, or a book/short story (Read Real Japanese?), and keep the timing info as meta-data and turn the sentences/words into clickable objects that call up the relevant video/audio. Seems like it should be easy enough.

For example, if one were to take say, Harry Potter the Japanese .txt/.pdf, make a .cue sheet for the Japanese audiobook, and integrate the .cue sheet so that instead of a playlist in an mp3 player it's links in the text file?

I wouldn't do Harry Potter myself, would prefer Read Real Japanese short stories or somesuch.

I guess one problem here would be if it's a longer multimedia file, you'd want the ability to stop/pause.

Would be cool if there was some kind of playlist add-on for multimedia players so you could control the format of the playlist, make it look like a regular series of sentences & paragraphs, make the .cue sheets that way.

That's an awesome link, thank you nest0r. I've been interested in developing something like this and have been formulating in my mind how to do it for a while now. I have a couple things to finish first before I can start working on this, but I fully intend to get to it.

I think making it just for youtube at first would be the easiest way, and pretty effective. Youtube provides a javascript API for manipulating the video, and getting data from the video, while embedded in your site.

To make the process simpler, rather than having it like the process of creating subtitles, I think mine will just let you mark the start time in the video of a given line in a transcript. The time at which a sentence spoken ends is needed for subtitles, since you don't want text to stay up there once the line is over, but is irrelevant for our learning purposes.

The hardest part of this really is coming up with an intuitive UI. The Javascript is not that hard I think.

edit: Youtube already has a way to add subtitles (captions - in the same language as the video, for accessibility purposes) to videos. Maybe if it's easy enough to use their subtitle system, my application would not have to deal with creating the subtitles. It would only need to provide the client for pulling down the subtitles for a given video, and making them into a clickable, interactive transcript. Maybe a new caption system would be better though. I'll have to do some research.

I did some research, and youtube just accepts any standard subtitle file. So it will be simple to work with what they already have in place, though I'd like to make a simple way to generate the subtitles (but where each subtitle ends when the following sub begins).

I wonder how many Youtube videos in Japanese already have captions (in Japanese..). If there's enough, I could just make a better client for viewing them and leave the caption generator for later.


edit: I found a news source which posts videos with captioning: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_ty...ry=tokyomx

wahnfrieden Wrote:I did some research, and youtube just accepts any standard subtitle file. So it will be simple to work with what they already have in place, though I'd like to make a simple way to generate the subtitles (but where each subtitle ends when the following sub begins).

I wonder how many Youtube videos in Japanese already have captions (in Japanese..). If there's enough, I could just make a better client for viewing them and leave the caption generator for later.


edit: I found a news source which posts videos with captioning: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_ty...ry=tokyomx

Sounds good! Though I too will have to put further focus on this on hold awhile. Haven't really reached that phase of my regimen yet.