Comment by latexr
3 days ago
Clearly I’m in the minority, but I found the idea awful. The execution on the exercises is good—I especially like that you mix similarly sounding words—but my first thought as soon as I read your description was that the news are a terrible, worrying choice which could be misused to push a specific agenda on learners. Lo and behold, first thing I try is Musk’s dad calling people bums. Learners shouldn’t be subjected to polarised opinions at the same time they are trying to internalise words. Use instead some neutral science channels like Veritasium, CGP Grey, or Vsauce.
I agree that channels should be checked more carefully. I initially added two news channels per language. But some of those are pretty horrible (like Skynews). I'll put some more time in adjusting the channels. For example, TF1 is really great for French. It can be colored but it has many non-political or more local items.
I picked news channels because they often have short well spoken videos.
This is probably better even if you just select non-US news channels showing non-US news items. NHK 24 kind of thing.