About

Why I built this

I built this while learning Portuguese. Everything I found was either too easy to bother with or too hard to follow, and there was no way to tell which until you'd already pressed play and wasted ten minutes. So I built something that tracks what level I'm actually at and only shows me stuff that matches.

How it works

Every video and podcast on here has a difficulty score, and so do you, using the same rating system chess uses for player rankings, just pointed at language content instead of chess players.

Watch or listen to something, then tell us how it felt: Too Easy, Just Right, or Too Hard. Each rating moves your score a little closer to where you actually are, and the library keeps adjusting to follow you as you improve.

Mark two things “Just Right” in the same language within 24 hours and we'll ask which felt harder, and it's worth doing whenever the prompt shows up, because that one comparison tells us more than two separate ratings would, pinning both scores against each other instead of adjusting them independently.

Early on, with only a handful of ratings, the system is basically guessing, so recommendations can feel a bit off, but that settles fast as it gets more to go on, trusting your score more and tightening the recommendations along the way.

Ratings on individual videos and podcasts go stale as well. If something hasn't been rated in a while, its score might be out of date, so its confidence fades instead of sticking around forever.

Don't want to wait for the system to catch up? Use the manual slider to push your recommendations harder or easier than your actual rating, whenever you like.