Japanese & Korean immersion that adapts to you
Verba finds YouTube videos with the words you need to see, when you need to see them. Click any word for what it means in that sentence.
The problem
Not all immersion time is equal
You learn a word when you meet it again in a new context. The most common words turn up in every other sentence, so you pick them up fast.
Then the frequency drops off. Each new group of words is half as frequent as the last, so you have to double your input to keep learning at the same pace. That's why immersion takes years, and why so many people burn out on the way.
The chart shows how often each word turns up. The strip under it shows what that means when you immerse. You meet the common words all the time. You meet a rare word so seldom that you forget it before you see it again.
I went to the to get my after lunch.
The idea
Compressing the timeline
Anki guarantees that you see a word when you need to see it. Immersion gives you that word in a real context, a different one each time. Verba puts the two together. While you immerse, it finds the videos that contain the words you need to see.
Each dot is one meaningful exposure to a word you're learning. Verba makes sure the words you need show up in what you watch, when you need to see them.
The product
How Verba adapts to you
Videos picked for you
Verba recommends videos that contain the words you're due to review, and the words you've seen before.
Flashcards inside your immersion
Due words glow in the transcript. Click one and you review it in a new sentence, inside the video you're watching. If you don't like flashcards, you can turn them off.
The meaning in this sentence
Verba links each word to the meaning it has in that sentence, so you don't have to guess from a list of definitions.
Accurate transcripts, split into real words
YouTube's auto-captions get a lot wrong, so Verba writes its own transcript of every video from scratch.
Japanese has no spaces between words, so Verba also works out where each word starts and stops. That's why you can click one word and get one meaning.
Why I built it
I've tried every tool and every strategy that people recommend for language immersion. The advice was trust the process, and eventually I just got burned out.
So I spent the last few years asking why it has to be this slow: poring through linguistics research, talking to professors from Princeton and MIT about how language acquisition works, testing every product on the market.
Verba is what I set out to build. If anything seems confusing or broken, email me. I read everything.
Ben Woodward