Real videos. Real English. Real vocabulary. Watch curated YouTube clips or paste your own URL - every caption is interactive. Tap a word to see its meaning, an example sentence, and pronunciation. Save what you don't know. Come back tomorrow and it's still there.
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TED-Ed riddles, BBC interviews, 3Blue1Brown explainers, travel vlogs. Real native pace, real idioms, real noise. The vocabulary you pick up is the vocabulary people actually use - not whatever a course-book author thought you should learn.
We tokenize every caption so each word is a tap target. One tap opens a popover with the definition, part of speech, IPA pronunciation, and an example sentence - fetched from a dictionary or generated by AI for words the dictionary doesn't have. The video pauses while you read.
Saved words and sentences live in your personal vocabulary list with the original cue context - what came before the word, what came after, what video it was from. You can replay any saved item back into the practice surface to hear it again in the moment that taught you.
Most English-learning videos are made for English learners. They're slow, simplified, and forgettable. The videos you actually want to understand - interviews, comedy, news analysis, your favorite YouTuber - are the ones standard courses leave you unprepared for. There's a giant gap between B1 textbook English and the speed and richness of real native content, and most apps don't bridge it.
fluentwith's video mode bridges it the only way that works: you watch real videos, and we make them interactive. Pick from a curated library covering 24 cells (3 levels × 8 topics - story, news, business, casual, motivational, dialogue, tech, travel) or paste any YouTube URL with captions. We fetch the captions, tokenize every word, and lay down tappable spans over the player. Tap a word, get its meaning. Tap a sentence's 'Explain' icon, get a learner-friendly paraphrase plus any idioms or non-literal usage flagged.
What makes this different from looking words up in a separate tab: speed and context. By the time you've alt-tabbed to a dictionary, you've lost the audio, the visual, and the moment. Here, the video pauses the instant you tap, the definition is one finger-tap away, and when you save the word it's stored with the full sentence context so when you review it tomorrow you remember why you saved it. That single change - vocabulary saved with where it came from - is what makes saved words actually stick instead of becoming dead-list noise.
Captions are the secret weapon. Researchers have studied subtitle-supported listening for decades and the result is consistent: learners who watch native content with same-language subtitles improve listening comprehension faster than learners doing audio-only practice. The reason is that captions reduce the cognitive load of word-segmentation - you don't have to figure out where one word ends and the next begins, so your brain has more room to attach meaning to the sounds. Our interactive captions take that one step further: you don't just see the word, you can poke at it.
Privacy and quality notes worth knowing up-front. Curated clips ship with their captions committed to source - they don't depend on YouTube's caption API being available, so they're rock-solid. User-pasted URLs require a one-time captions fetch from YouTube; that takes 5-15 seconds in the background while you see a 'preparing your video' loading state. Once fetched, captions are stored against your session so they don't need re-fetching on reload. We embed YouTube videos in their privacy-enhanced (youtube-nocookie) variant, which transmits less to Google than a regular embed.
There's no signup wall to try video practice - the curated library is visible on the homepage, and the first three saved items are free for everyone. Saving more requires a free account so we can keep your vocabulary list across sessions. No credit card, no ads, no upsells.
Three things working together: (1) pick content slightly above your current level - comprehensible enough to follow with effort; (2) actively engage with vocabulary you don't know rather than letting it slide past; (3) review what you saved within 24 hours. fluentwith's video mode is built around exactly that loop: real videos, interactive captions, one-tap save, vocabulary list that comes back later.
Yes, as long as the video has captions (human-authored or auto-generated) and is publicly embeddable. Paste the URL into the picker and we'll fetch the captions in the background. We've tested with TED talks, BBC interviews, vlogs, comedy clips, news segments, and explainer videos. Music videos and silent content don't work since there's nothing to caption.
We surface a clean error ('this video has no captions, try another') and don't create a broken practice session. About 70% of YouTube English content has captions; for the 30% that doesn't, the captions endpoint we use returns nothing and we tell you up front rather than silently failing.
When the page loads, we run every caption through a Unicode-aware tokenizer that finds word boundaries (handling apostrophes, hyphens, accents) and a POS-tagger that resolves lemmas - 'children' → 'child', 'made' → 'make'. The result is one tap target per word, plus a separate 'Explain' button per sentence. On tap, we look up the lemma in the Free Dictionary API; on miss, we fall back to a single Haiku-class AI call. Definitions are cached cross-user so the second person to tap 'serendipity' gets it instantly.
More ways to practice English speaking with AI: all modes
Casual conversationInterview EnglishBusiness EnglishTravel EnglishNetworking EnglishEnglish debateStorytellingPronunciation
Yes, indefinitely, until you delete the items or your account. Saved words include the surface form (exactly what you tapped), the lemma (the dictionary headword), the part of speech, the definition, the original sentence context, and the source video. You can search and filter your saved list; tap any item to jump back into the video at the cue start.
Free. The curated library is open to anonymous visitors. Free signed-in users can paste any YouTube URL, save unlimited vocabulary, and replay saved items. We don't run ads. No credit card required.