TL;DR: I built a web app called LangGlitch that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos (and soon podcasts/graded readers) for multiple languages, starting with German, Vietnamese, and English. I want it to become a one‑stop place for comprehensible input for every language, including small/obscure ones, and would love your feedback and language requests.
Hey folks, I’m Stefan, a guy from Germany who loves travelling and getting lost in new cultures and languages. In school I was terrible at languages and grammar never really made sense to me, but at some point I realised I had somehow become fluent in English just by playing games and watching YouTube in English.
Looking back, what worked for me was basically “comprehensible input”: content that I mostly understood and actually cared about, consumed for fun rather than as “study”. These days I always try to learn new languages that way, but I kept running into the same problem: unless you’re learning something huge like Spanish or Japanese, good comprehensible‑input content is scattered and hard to find.
So I decided to build something for myself and ended up turning it into a proper project: LangGlitch – a little web app that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos for language learners. Right now it supports German, Vietnamese, and English, with playlists grouped by difficulty, tags, and creators. You can sort for “easiest”, filter for topics you like, and then just watch your way through material instead of hunting for the next decent video.
I’d love for LangGlitch to eventually cover every language out there, including the really small and “obscure” ones, so it can be a genuine one‑stop place for comprehensible input. If there’s a language you’re passionate about and want to see added sooner rather than later, tell me in the comments or message me and I’ll do my best to prioritise it.
I’ve just put it into free open beta, so anyone can sign up and play around with it. I’m planning to add more languages over time, plus podcasts and graded readers, and if it ever makes enough money to pay its own bills I’d love to commission new comprehensible‑input content for underrepresented languages as well.
If you try it, I’d really appreciate honest feedback: confusing UI, missing features, annoying bugs, anything. You can leave comments here, DM me, or join the Discord (linked on the site) and yell at me there. Screenshots in the comments so you can get a feel for how it looks.
Tried it out, and it’s pretty cool! Nice work on making things look good.
The landing page - it feels a bit corporate. Seeing the cookie stuff feels like a bit much for this stage. I get that it might be needed though. The testimonials feel phony, and like they’re in too many places. Though again, I get that you gotta have something to break up the space.
I like that it surfaces the pitch for CI, and explains it. The paragraph sections feel dense tho, imo could use some more whitespace and possibly a cut back on the word count.
What I don’t see featured right up front is the supported languages! As a potential user, that’s the first thing I want to know. That’ll be a better selling point you support more. But I’d say prioritize getting a few videos for many languages, and putting it in focus.
Also, when I was first scrolling through, it kicked me to a loading spinner when I was halfway down the page – maybe carousel hadn’t loaded in yet? Not sure what it was going on, but it was jarring.
Enough nitpicking the marketing page though, I did sign up for and log into the actual app. Love that it makes it easier to find these videos. I’ve tried searching Comprehensible Input [Language name] before and trying to sift through Youtube, it can be a mess. Having it ogranized and cataloged for each language is great, and I look forward to seeing this expand.
First thought - I’m not personally a fan of infinite scroll. Would it be possible to add an option for paging, or a button to refresh? It’s already randomized, so the scrolling isn’t exactly going down a certain progression. At one point I saw a video I wanted to watch, clicked to a different page, then tried to come back… only to realized I’d have to filter/search to find it again.
Guessing it’s on the roadmap - but is there a plan to add saves (watch later)? Seems like it would be useful. Maybe could be done as a custom playlist or similar.
Clicking on tags - there’s a delay when I do this. It’s probably less than a second, but feels like forever in UI. It’s enough that I have time to think “Oh, the click didn’t take, let me try again” and do another click. At first I thought I had to double click to open it. But I do love that you’re tagging these things - organization and curation is your biggest value-add, so really hone in on that. Playlists too - right now it looks like they’re just the ones from the channels you embed, but there’s probably opportunity there to make some custom playlists that focus on curating certain interest, topics, or language skills.
There are a lot of tags - some of them maybe even seem too specific. I wonder if there’s room to prune some of them? On a similar note, it takes quite a long time to scroll through them - it’d be nice to be able to browse multiple columns of them at once. Tho I understand the type-ahead box is the main way to find them. After scrolling for a while (at least in German), eventually some are out of order - it shows “Youtube” then “Activities”, then goes in alphabetical order again up to I.
Progress tracking has a ‘days you practiced’ indicator. Might be nice to see some kind of calendar visualization here. Anyway, I really really like that you can manually add input time from outside of the app. Progress is the other big selling point, so whatever ways you can find to flesh that out would be good.
I think a limited watch time for the free tier is a huge stretch, considering that this is aggregating Youtube videos. That’d just drive me to leave and watch them on Youtube, or some alternative front-end. I do think it makes sense to limit the amount of progress tracking though. Imo that seems like a hook to get people in - let them track progress free for a week or two when they sign up, then stop tracking it until they subscribe to a paid tier.
Not sure on what a fair price would be… I’d say low low, subscription fatigue is very real, but apparently a lot of people still sign up for stuff. Personally, there’s such a wealth of free learning resources out there, that I rarely pay for any, unless I’m buying a physical object (book), or someone’s direct attention (class, tutor). If I were to pay for a service, I’d only be interested in a one-time purchase for a pretty low price. I realize that’s not helpful and I don’t want to be discouraging… wish you the best of luck turning it into something profitable. It does seem like you’ve done good work. But it’s a pretty tough one, considering that you’re somewhat competing with free Youtube videos, but also with things like https://app.dreaming.com/ and https://cijapanese.com/ that both run a site and make the videos.
Wow, thanks for the amazing feedback! This helps a lot!
Your concerns about the Landingpage are valid & yes its pretty much a layout copy of cjjapanese. I myself am not very good at marketing & design so that’s why I just started with something that already works. The Landingpage will get a full redesign after some feedback (I will for sure highlight the currently available languages!).
On your thoughts of the infinite scroll, I understand your sentiment but I think this is also highly subjective. I could probably add a setting or something similar that changes form infinite scroll to paging but that would be a pretty low priority at the moment. I’d rather improve the infinite scroll in away that it isn’t annoying, so would it be better to not load randomly & order them by Difficulty as the default option?
A Watch-Later option is something I will do for sure but its also not the highest priority but a nice feature that will for sure come.
The Tag loading problem might happen because I didn’t scale up the server very high at the moment for cost saving reasons during the test phase. This should resolve itself when I scale up the Server & databases at a later point. I agree that there are a lot of tags but there are also a lot of different Videos on the platform already & they will only expand. Maybe I can consolidate some at a later point & remove the ones that only have very few videos.
I like the Calendar progress tracking suggestion. I will add that!
Hmm, I see your point that you could just use my platform to discover the Videos & then watch them on Youtube but that is a general problem I guess. But what the platform is offering isn’t necessarily the content but aggregation, discoverability & curation and some people just might not value that. So if I offer unlimited watch-time in the free tier it might not be sustainable as a business because Progress tracking alone isn’t a selling point in my opinion. The problem on the Free tier also would be that it would be Ad-supported & that doesn’t really make a lot of money unless you go overboard with them. Currently you make $0.00025 to $0.002 per banner ad impression which isn’t a lot & I only planned to add some ads into the Video browse page & a small banner into the Videoplayer so I don’t think I would be able to recoup even only the cost on a free tier user. But nothing is decided yet so I might just have to go with it anyway to get people to use the app.
Yea subscription fatigue is a huge problem right now, especially for SaaS businesses. That’s why i would probably aim between 2-4$/month for the premium version. Also Dreaming & CiJapanese are for sure competitors but only in one language so I think there is still a lot of value in my Service. Also I don’t see the free Youtube Videos as a big competitor because the core of the business isn’t the content itself (not yet at least, I hope I can produce some later).
On your thoughts of the infinite scroll, I understand your sentiment but I think this is also highly subjective.
Right, it is for sure just my opinion and probably not a very popular one.
so would it be better to not load randomly & order them by Difficulty as the default option?
Loading randomly is still an important thing, I think. I’d have liked to not be surprised by it, but I do think it’s important to have a way to get a random selection of videos within a difficulty tier.
The Tag loading problem might happen because I didn’t scale up the server very high at the moment for cost saving reasons during the test phase. This should resolve itself when I scale up the Server & databases at a later point.
Is there a way you can load that in the background as the rest of the page loads, and/or cache it? Point taken though, not something to sweat too much if it’ll self-resolve.
I agree that there are a lot of tags but there are also a lot of different Videos on the platform already & they will only expand. Maybe I can consolidate some at a later point & remove the ones that only have very few videos.
A lot is not necessarily bad, just keep in mind the keyword is curation. Constantly evaluate to see if the tags are helping users find what they want, and make sure the tags on the videos are highly accurate and relevant. That probably does lead to more.
Hmm, I see your point that you could just use my platform to discover the Videos & then watch them on Youtube but that is a general problem I guess. But what the platform is offering isn’t necessarily the content but aggregation, discoverability & curation and some people just might not value that.
Also I don’t see the free Youtube Videos as a big competitor because the core of the business isn’t the content itself (not yet at least, I hope I can produce some later).
I think Youtube really, really is your biggest competitor though (Youtube itself as a front-end, not the videos on it). It may be a general problem, but it’s the biggest one you have to solve - why watch videos on this site instead of going to Youtube? I think the embeds always have that big ‘watch on Youtube’ button for them to conveniently leave, after which they’re in Youtube’s discovery pipeline with no restrictions. Even if they can no longer see recommendations on LangGlitch, they learned the name of at least one or two channels so they know where to look. YT’s recommendation algorithm takes over from there, plus most good CI channels already have nice playlists organized by level.
To be honest, I just had this kind of experience with Dreaming Spanish the other day. Realized they had a website, started watching videos there, then after a day or two got told ‘no’ on something and immediately left. Sorry, I don’t know how to turn this around and make it very constructive, I guess I’m just giving my thoughts as a learner.
I guess the way I’d look at it is you have to offer a lot of value up front, then gradually alter the deal over time. That sucks for customers, but I guess it’s a way to make money. That’s the playbook for most online services - offer a sweet product at free or ridiculously low cost, get people to love and depend on it, then degradify and turn the screws on price. As a human not backed by a VC or megacorp though, I dunno that that’s viable. (Sorry again… this paragraph sounds way more cynical than I wanted it to… Anyway, strong note to not take any business advice from me, I don’t know anything about monetizing a product or running a company.)
Also Dreaming & CiJapanese are for sure competitors but only in one language so I think there is still a lot of value in my Service.
Yep, going multilang is a great differentiator here. Small note though that Dreaming does Spanish and has started doing French, and sounds like they plan to do more in the future, so sharks in the water there. But I think you’ve got an angle, targeting less popular languages and curating from lots of channels.
Again, best of luck. I think it’ll be very challenging to make it work, but it probably can. Tagging and organizing tons of videos and making them easy to find is really admirable. Two other random possibilities that come to mind that could be cool: crowdsourcing tags or most relevant tag rankings, detailed transcription search and stats per video
Curious also, what’s your methodology? Do you run everything through an LLM pipeline, grab tags directly from tags on YT, manually review?
Your Feedback about Youtube is pretty valid tbh. So yea no Idea on how to handle that problem but I just hope people like the platform enough to use it over Youtube. It worked for DreamingSpanish in the beginning (before they had premium videos) as well so it could also work for me. I guess we will see.
And yea the plan to enshitify overtime is not really something I wanna do. I just wanna over value at a reasonable price so people just don’t mind paying for the convenience. Also I don’t think is even a valid way if you don’t have VC money to burn.
And yes I saw DreamingSpanish changing to Dreaming.com & them offering French now but I think their business model is just different. They focus on extremely high Quality Content that they have control over & that makes them expand slower in to new languages. So for the meantime it should be fine.
About your two Ideas:
- Crowdsourcing Tags could be possible in the future for sure but also demands a lot of Moderation work from myself.
- Most relevant Tag Rankings: I’m not exactly sure what you mean with this? Do you mean inside the tag dropdown to show the ones people searched the most for / used the most? Or something completely different?
My Methodology rn is the following: I use a tool I created to scrape/download all the Video Information from a Channel that I want to Integrate into the platform. This data gets put into a google docs sheet & then let an LLM Model (n8n) run over all the data to change Title & Description. After that I manually Double check titles & descriptions. Now I assign tags & Difficulty and other internal values. Last step is importing the Google Sheet into my Platform.
I’m currently working on a fully integrated process inside my Admin tool to have less manual steps (copying back and forth, manual Import, etc.)
And yea the plan to enshitify overtime is not really something I wanna do. I just wanna over value at a reasonable price so people just don’t mind paying for the convenience. Also I don’t think is even a valid way if you don’t have VC money to burn.
Always glad to hear that! Hope I didn’t come across as accusational, just kinda where my mind went trying to put on a business hat. Scary thing (maybe not for your service, but for many) is that fair-deal services have to compete with those that offer unsustainably high-value services cheap/free to get people in the door (I mean, I guess Youtube is a good example of this).
Another musing, might be nice to have videos from other sources too. PeerTube, Odysee, Vimeo, BilliBilli exist. Tiktok has some good stuff, for sure. I don’t think this is worth the trouble though, considering those first few have almost no content.
Crowdsourcing Tags, Most relevant Tag Rankings
True, it would be a lot of work. Maybe, depending on your user-base, a tag only gets nominated if some # of users suggest it (say, 2+ for now). Then it goes to the suggestions queue for you to look at it. Maybe new tags, but maybe not even that, just other tags you already have that aren’t applied to any videos. I realize you already have a ‘send feedback’ thing though, so that’s probably enough right now. Also, this could involve your Discord - maybe a channel automatically gets posts sent like “Should this video have the xyz tag?” and people react thumbs up, thumbs down.
Rankings - my thinking was a few tags could maybe show under the video when browsing. Or searching by tag could return ones where the tag is most relevant.
My Methodology rn is the following: I use a tool I created to scrape/download all the Video Information from a Channel that I want to Integrate into the platform. This data gets put into a google docs sheet & then let an LLM Model (n8n) run over all the data to change Title & Description. After that I manually Double check titles & descriptions. Now I assign tags & Difficulty and other internal values. Last step is importing the Google Sheet into my Platform.
Glad to hear the tags are human added. LLM only approach would scale better, but produce silly nonsense sometimes and make the site less fun. I do think if you have any LLM generated content (titles and description) that’s user facing, that should probably be disclosed somewhere in an About or FAQ page. For the difficulty though, that can probably use some input from automation (not even necessarily LLM, just good old fashioned code) - might not be too hard to figure out words per minute, % of common words, etc from the transcript and run time. But difficulty values from the channel that created it are probably more accurate, and I imagine most of them say what they’re targeting. And analysis wouldn’t capture things like visual aids.
Lol, I didn’t realize until after I posted that link that your landing page is mostly a copy of cijapanese’s. Placeholder for now?
Some Screenshots to get a better feel for the App
What are your long term plans for it? Are you leaning towards open source / self hosted, paid plans, ads, etc
I’m currently planning to add 3 tiers of Users to the plattform after the open beta period is over (no end date yet).
Free-Tier:
- Limited watchtime per month & Ads
Subscription tier (price tbd -> Open for feedback on what would be a fair price)
- Unlimited watchtime, No Ads
Lifetime tier (One time payment with price tbd | Limited supply maybe around 100 slots?)
- All Premium features
- Roadmap access
- Exclusive Discord community
- Early beta features
- Lifetime access guarantee
This is what you currently find on the Website.
I’d happily sit through and actually pay attention to ads if they were always and only in the language I’m trying to learn. I suppose that may be a hard sell for advertisers, but I’d counter that I don’t need much language skill to recognize most brands in any language.
I really like that idea! I think that whenever I switch the radio to a foreign language station - “haha, can’t get me, I’m here for anything in Spanish!”, but then I still leave it merely exposed to the name of the local automall.
Wonder if it’d make sense @LangGlitch, to have sponsored videos, that read a few minutes of copy about how great x or y is, but in target languages? Could be a good way to feed into some gamification/rewards shennanigans - watch a sponsored video, get some extra watch time or tracking time.
Well, the Ads on the page would only be banner ads because it’s illegal to play preroll Ads on embedded Youtube videos. But I like the Idea of setting them as the TL
