Supported Languages @LangoLAB

Hi everyone!

LangoLAB is happy to announce that we now support 43 languages at sign-up, and those same 43 languages for video captions. This means that our English video library is now accessible to far more people than before! Google Translate will be supplying the initial translations, as always, so please help us and your fellow learners by editing them!

Also, just a reminder: our video request feature is up and running, so if you see a video in the foreign language you're learning that you'd like to see up on the site, just request it and we'll get it captioned for you. Use or build your own playlists to get maximum exposure to thematically linked videos!

If you like these two features, or if you'd like to see something else up on LangoLAB, we're all ears. Please let us know by e-mailing us at feedback at langolab dot com.

-the LangoLAB team

New Features Coming Out on langoLAB

Hi, everyone! We're almost in our second month here at TechStars and are working like madmen to make langoLAB into something that will give you as much exposure to native speakers as possible on a webpage.

A lot of people who have sounded off lately have mentioned that they learned to speak a foreign language by immersing themselves in it by any means necessary. They listened to music, caught the news, watched movies... and interacted with people who speak that language on a daily basis as often as they could.

Now you'll be able to communicate with other users who speak the language you're studying on langolab.com. Here are some ways you can connect:

• Participate in the video request. Here's how it works: you're a native speaker of English studying German. You contact us with a video that you'd like captioned. We caption it for you. Soon we hope to have a video exchange where users are able to caption videos for each other!
  
• Make a playlist. You'll be able to link videos by subject, or grammar, or any other criteria you can think of. Help other people learn the language your learning with the videos that helped you most!

In other news, we've also organized our existing videos by difficulty level. Just look on the right side of the page at the beginner, basic, intermediate, and advanced links and choose your level. Beginners are just starting out learning a foreign language. Basic assumes that you can say hello, goodbye, please and thank you. Intermediate is when you can maintain a short conversation and get around, and advanced is near-fluency in a foreign language.

As always, if you have any feedback about the site, or would like to see something else we haven't thought of, send us an e-mail at cofounders at langolab dot com.

langoLAB Feedback

Hello there, users. (Waving awkwardly)

It has recently been impressed upon us how important it is to take into account what you want. At TechStars, we have constant sessions with members of the start-up elite. These people have been where we are now and managed to make something that truly recognized and addressed the plight of their consumer. Our mentor session today further cemented the understanding in our heads that we're really developing a site for you. We at langoLAB have stopped developing a vacuum and are actively looking for beta testers to tell us what they DON'T like.

Interested in sounding off? E-mail us at feedback at langolab dot com or hit the big orange button on the site! Plzkthx! Next post is about NEW ground-breaking features coming up!

Culturally Significant Individuals

I felt that, in light of recent events, I should pay some sort of tribute to someone so culturally significant that all other news has been moved to the second page as a result of his death. So Michael Jackson is now up on langoLAB for your English-learning pleasure.

I can’t claim to have been a fanatic of Michael Jackson’s music, but I do recognize the impact that he had on the American music scene. Unlike many pop stars today, Michael actually had the voice to back up the pop. One video that sticks out in my mind from my childhood is “Remember the Time“. So exotic and beautiful, totally visually engaging, with the Somalian supermodel, Iman, as Nefertiti and Eddie Murphy as Ramses (a bit of a historical mix-up, but hey, I’m just being nitpicky here). I remember being transfixed – it was unlike anything I’d ever seen on television before. He was groundbreaking – the one who took music out of the studio, off of the radio, and put it into mainstream entertainment. Kudos to him. What’s your favorite Michael Jackson song? What about video?

Meaningful Interaction for Fluency

You know how they say that it takes a village to raise a child? I agree, but I'll extend and warp the metaphor a little further - it takes a village to raise a child (or an adult) to speak. To speak grammatically, knowledgeably... eloquently. One of our main foci at langoLAB is to harness the foreign language-speaking community and to give them a place to interact, so that each user's experience directly benefits other users. My own passion for this stems from personal experience - from feeling isolated in a teacher-centric atmosphere in high school and college. We would sit, facing front, listening to overly complicated grammatical explanations. One person would ask a question, the teacher would answer him and we'd move on to the next task at hand. Or we'd stare down at our books, while someone read a sentence out loud and we'd repeat. Sometimes we wrote tests, sometimes we conjugated verbs, but we lacked the most valuable thing for fluency in a language: interaction with native speakers.

In order to speak well, you need hours of interactions with people fluent in the language you're studying. You need to discuss a variety of topics, recognize different styles, emulate dialects, and otherwise immerse yourself in the language and culture. I haven't forgotten the disillusionment I felt while studying in school. A lot of the indignation is still there, at a system that let me down. At TechStars, we're trying to channel that energy into producing a product that really addresses the problem.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

According to Sir Ken Robinson, innovation extraordinaire, people are being educated out of their capacity for creativity. Human creativity spans a variety of disciplines and draws from a rich reservoir of interactions and experiences, a reality that is not being taken into account in world educational systems. We, starting from a very young age, all have a tremendous talent for thought outside the box. This innate gift is being stifled within the constraints of schools, whose unilateral approach produces students who can answer a factual question, but who aren’t necessarily intelligent. Traditional teaching methods are staid. Outdated. Ineffective. And they’re affecting our ability to produce critical thinkers who question. Who reason. And who strive to understand the greater meaning behind a concept, rather than simply regurgitating what they’ve been told. Education is supposed to take us into the future. What kind of future are we headed toward if everyone thinks exactly the same way? Check out his lecture here – it’s worth your time.

Now let's expand for a moment. Think back to the way you learned a foreign language. Was it approached creatively? Do you feel like you were challenged? How about entertained? I don't. Most people remember rote memorization, grammar drills and verb conjugations, reading long texts, writing exercises, and pointless partner activities that left both parties thinking "God, how lame". THAT I remember. A shame - today's administrators have a bevy of resources at their disposal. Technology is rapidly expanding into the educational sphere, making it possible to creatively engage learners through a variety of media. langoLAB takes this creativity into the foreign language learning space, giving you access to compelling, native speaker-generated videos with a set of interactive tools that lets you play with them. Check out this video in our French section - it left me in stitches. An exercise in creativity if I ever saw one, and great for beginning/intermediate learners.

Exciting New Features at Langolab!

At Langolab we are aggressively positioning ourselves for absolute learn-foreign-language-through-video supremacy. (Muahahaha!) We will not rest until we've come up with the best ideas, the most entertaining and effective content, and the most amazing features. Every week we want to come out with features of an increasingly awesome nature, and ultimately we want to totally blow you away. Here's what's new for this week.

New Dictionary

At langolab you can click on words in video captions (and any other text) to get definitions in your native language. We've partnered with bab.la for foreign word definitions.

You can vote for the best definition for the word you clicked on. The best definition ends up at the top with a special look to indicate it's the "correct" definition.

If you don't see the right definition, you can always add a new one to the dictionary. Your definition will help you and any other users.




Of course, you can still create sets of flash cards with the definitions. Watch the video, test yourself on the words, then go back and watch the video again. Rock!

Caption Translations

We came up with the most awesome caption translation system possible. It works by grabbing translations from Google Translate, and then letting users edit them into correctness. To try it out, watch a video and select a language for translation.


The machine translations are usually flawed (to say the least), so users are encouraged to edit them to make them more appropriate. Try it, it's fun and you're helping out a lot of people by doing it.