FluentFlix Wants to Take You to the Movies So You Can Learn Chinese

Online education is a fast-growing sector, and given China’s swift economic growth, a lot of people are interested in studying Chinese. But language study can be a long, hard slog. One startup has a solution for tired Chinese learners out there: watch movies!

FluentFlix is a startup web service that aims to teach you Chinese using videos and film clips. On signing up, users can select their language level, what kinds of clips they want to see (i.e. film clips, news, commercials, music videos, etc.) and what genres they prefer (entertainment, business, science, tech, etc.). Once they’ve made their selections, the FluentFlix homepage becomes a customized dashboard that gives them access to videos of an appropriate language level on varying topics.

As you can see from my options above, there aren’t a huge number of choices yet, and some of the news videos are pretty old. Clicking on a video brings you to a page where the video plays smoothly while subtitles scroll below the screen with characters, pinyin, and an English translation. You can pause at any time to read a sentence more slowly, and you can also click on words to listen to the pronunciation and add them to your vocabulary list.

The video selection is thin, and the vocabulary list doesn’t offer a lot of functionality yet — flashcards would be cool — but it seems like a very promising service that could really be great once it has built up a solid library of interesting evergreen content. I’m not sold yet on FluentFlix being your one-stop-shop for Chinese language learning, but it could definitely become an indispensable tool for users whose learning styles are well-suited to video study.

I was curious about the folks behind the site, so I talked with founder Alan Park about his inspiration for founding the company:

I was always intrigued by entrepreneurship, but the real spark for FluentFlix was the idea of a “video textbook”. I couldn’t imagine a world where people were still learning languages primarily from textbooks with the sheer amount of rich online video content available. I think we’re all familiar with the story of the person who became fluent in English from watching Friends or Hollywood movies. These instances show that people don’t remember dry facts, they remember experiences — videos are the best way to convert dry vocab words into memorable experiences.

Given my obsession with language learning, the fact that it hadn’t been done yet, and that I was young as I’d ever be, I thought it was the right opportunity at the right time.

The team behind FluentFlix is small but dedicated, and apparently they’re churning out videos like there’s no tomorrow. When I asked Park about the slim video selection and somewhat outdated news videos, he told me:

We are currently uploading upwards of 20 new videos a week, and we can only expect this rate to increase as we welcome new users and scale the business. We focus on featuring timely and relevant videos, often dealing with current events and pop culture. This is core to our belief in offering engaging and stimulating content for the learner. This does, however, inevitably cause some content to eventually fall out of date. Yet as long as we are satisfying our users’ demand for new videos, we don’t see this as a problem, and the vast majority of our users enjoy having a rich backlog of videos to explore.