I recently received this email from the co-founder of 22 frames.com. The site offers some really useful learning aids for English conversation.
“I’m a co-developer of a captioned video site called 22frames.com. It has indexed several thousands of captioned videos from all over the Internet, and it’s growing. Recently, we found out that many of our users are using the site to supplement their English learning (see:http://www.22frames.com/esl.aspx ). They also began to pitch ideas we could implement to make the site even more useful for this activity.
With so many requests, we decided to seriously consider these ideas and devote significant time and resources into realizing them. Now,we are turning our site into a substantial and FREE English learning resource. We are aware of a couple sites out there that are also focused on using captioned videos for English learning, so we’ve been focusing on the unique user-motivated features.
Therefore, my goal here is to let you know about our free resource and that we are opening the door to requests for anyone who might desire features that have not been implemented elsewhere. Perhaps, you can share this with your readers as it will help us better gauge which features to prioritize and to increase the rate with which we will release new features. Please note that we are really serious about considering whatever feedback we get.
I’m also pleased to announce our first feature, which we expect will help in learning/teaching popular English idioms. Idioms are a big deal in learning English, and it is clear that watching them used in real situations will increase the rate with which they are learned.
We therefore processed a large group of YouTube videos in our index and found *thousands* of captioned videos containing one or more idioms. These videos are viewable in many countries. For each idiom found, we provide an approximate time it is spoken in the video and a Cambridge dictionary link to its definition. Hopefully the time-stamp we give will allow users to fast-forward to more efficiently learn the idioms. Visit here to get started: http://www.22frames.com/idiomlist.aspx
Please note that this is just our first step! We will soon be doing something similar for slang terms and even more after. Again, anyone can help shape the site by giving us good ideas you want but do not see being offered by other sites. They can contact us using this page: http://www.22frames.com/contactus.aspx”
Check out the site and let the founders know what you think since they are seeking feedback.
