LinguaTube

Inspiration:

I came from a non-English-speaking country and studied in Singapore from a young age. I do not even know ABC upon landing in Singapore. I saw how difficult it can be to understand English in class but still feel nervous speaking it in daily life. I know learning English is probably the easiest when you enjoy what you are learning. And as an vivid youtube audience, I would love to use my youtube watchlist as my English learning source. But there are no such tools available now. I name it LinguaTube because lin, also 麟 in Chinese is associated with an auspicious mythical creature. gua is my favourite fruit in Chinese meaning melon. I hope practicing English can be like eating melons. Tube is because youtube is the main source of English resource. LinguaTube is designed to bridge that gap between learning English and actually living in English.

What it does: LinguaTube turns real English from YouTube videos, screenshots, and PDFs into practical learning. Users can shadow short video clips with synchronized transcripts and highlighted phrases, save useful vocabulary as flashcards, and rehearse real-life conversations. This is very useful for learning pronunciation, to listen first before saying it yourself.

How I built it: I built LinguaTube with React, Vite, FastAPI, Supabase, GPT-powered vocabulary extraction, OCR, text-to-speech, and spaced repetition. YouTube captions are segmented into short shadowing clips, while screenshots and PDFs can become flashcard decks.

Challenges I ran into: The hardest challenges were reliably extracting YouTube captions, keeping transcripts synchronized with video playback, generating concise example sentences, and making OCR-created deck thumbnails preserve the original image.

Accomplishments that I am proud of: I created a complete learning loop: shadow real English, save useful language, review it with flashcards, and practise it in real-life situations. I am especially proud that learners can use content they already watch instead of relying only on textbook examples.

What I learned I learned that language learning works best when it is contextual, personal, and immediately useful. A short phrase from a real video can be more memorable than a long vocabulary list. I made multiple version of edits and let people around me test it out intensively before coming to the final version.

What's next for LinguaTube

Next, I want to improve personalized recommendations, add more real-life scenarios, support more video sources, and make phrase feedback even smarter. My goal is to help learners build confidence before they need English in the real world.

Built With

• chatgpt5.6
• codex
• google-cloud