Learn German with the movies you actually want to watch.
The films worth watching are too hard to follow, and stopping to look up a word kills the film. Langvie is a free app that gives you a film's vocabulary first, each word with the line it was spoken in, so the dialogue lands as it goes past instead of blurring into one.
Pick a German movie at your level.
Tell Langvie your level once and the library leads with the films that fit it. You get a list worth an evening rather than a syllabus, and you choose by the things you would normally choose by: the rating, the genre, how long it runs.
- Every film shows its IMDb rating next to how hard its vocabulary runs.
- Sort by best fit, best rating, easiest or shortest, then filter by level, genre and length.
- Best fit ranks by how close a film sits to your level, so you are not guessing.
- Series sit beside the films, indexed a season at a time, so an evening of television counts too.
Learn the film's vocabulary before you watch.
Open a film and its vocabulary is already waiting, ordered by how often the film says each word, so the top of the list is what you will hear all evening. The hard words are in there because every word was graded before the list was cut. Work through them first and the film plays differently: the lines land as they go past instead of blurring into one.
- Graded before the list is cut, so the hard words survive instead of being crowded out.
- A Level control with the count at each, so you can take only the A2 words out of a C1 film.
- Mark what you already know and the deck keeps only the rest.
- The Frequent sort cuts it to the words the film leans on hardest.
Then keep them with flashcards.
Every word you keep lands in one deck, whichever film it came from. A card shows the word, then the meaning, then every line the catalog has for it, each named by its film and stamped with its timecode. That last part is the whole point, because you are learning the moment a word belongs to rather than the word on its own. Nachricht arrives quoting Der Pate and Der Untergang, one line under the other.
- Every line that quotes it, across every film, with the word lit inside it and the timecode beside it.
- Two answers, Repeat and Memorized, each saying when the word comes back before you choose it, with Too easy in the corner of the card.
- One deck across every film, running to a daily goal of twenty to start.
And hear how it is said.
Reading a German word tells you nothing about how it is said. So every German word in the catalog is recorded, and the front of the card carries a speaker under the word. Tap it and you hear die Nachricht, article and noun together, which is how an article gets learned at all.
- Nouns are spoken with their article, so der, die or das is part of what you hear.
- Choose a Germany or an Austria accent once in settings, and every card uses it. Switzerland is next.
- The speaker is on the front of the card, so you meet the sound before you see the meaning.
That is the whole app.
A library, a word list, and a session that hands you a word, a recording of it, and the lines it was said in. Putting it on your phone takes about a minute and costs nothing.
Spaced repetition brings it back just before you forget.
This is spaced repetition, the method every serious flashcard tool is built on, after the spacing effect Hermann Ebbinghaus described in his memory experiments in the 1880s. Get a word right and the gap widens. Miss it and you see it again before you put the phone down.
Numbers are days, and the gap does not stop at 64. It carries on to 141, then 310, then a year, because a word you have held for months does not need checking every month. Miss one and it comes back before you finish the session, then again tomorrow, which is the whole point of the boot. A word that had held for half a year is the exception: it lands a few days out rather than one, and climbs back in fewer steps. The schedule is settled by the database rather than by the phone, so two devices can never disagree about when a word is due and the ladder cannot be skipped from the client.
The German films and dubs you already meant to watch.
Each one carries its own vocabulary, taken from its German subtitle track. Every level is represented, so a film's list stays a deck rather than a glossary of its hardest words. Series are here too, indexed a season at a time. The level beside a title is an estimate, so pick a film the way you would pick a night in.
Pick one for tonight.
Learn the words it says most, then watch it and catch them going past. That is the entire loop.
Questions worth asking first.
Are these German films, or German dubs?
Mostly dubs, and it is worth knowing before you start. Pulp Fiction, Inception and the rest come from their German dub tracks, so the words are the German a dubbing studio wrote. Studios work in neutral Hochdeutsch with no dialect, clearly spoken, which makes it easy listening and a poor place to look for street speech. It is a good place to start, because you already know the plot. Das Boot, Das Leben der Anderen and M are German productions, so their subtitles carry the dialogue the actors speak.
Do I need to own or stream the film?
No. Langvie works from the subtitle vocabulary alone, so a film's deck stands on its own whether or not you have ever seen it. Watching the film afterwards is the reward, not the requirement. Each film page carries a link to it on Amazon Prime, for the evening you do want to watch.
How is this different from Anki?
Anki has the better scheduler and probably always will. What it does not hand you is a reason to learn a particular word today. A word off a frequency list is one you have never used and never heard, and that is where most German decks die. Every word here is one you are about to hear, in a film you chose, in the line it is spoken in. If your card-making habit is already running, keep Anki. If it keeps dying on you, this is the part that was missing.
Why is it not on the App Store or Google Play?
It installs from the browser instead, which gives you the same home screen icon and the same full screen app without a store account in the way. Store versions may come later.
Which languages does it cover?
German is the one that is ready. English has a season indexed and sits in settings rather than on the first screen, because one series is not a library. French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Korean are waiting on their subtitle indexes. Translations on the back of a card come in English, Russian, Ukrainian or Spanish, whichever you pick when you start.
Are the words read out loud?
Every German word in the catalog is recorded, so the front of a card carries a speaker under the word. A noun is spoken with its article, which is the part reading never teaches you. Pick a Germany or an Austria accent once in settings and every card uses it. A Swiss accent is next, because the clips are generated one accent at a time.
How accurate are the levels?
Call them estimates. A word's level comes from the Goethe Institut word lists for A1, A2 and B1, which are the vocabulary those exams publish. A word on none of the three is graded instead by how common it is in German, using a frequency ranking built from subtitles. That sorts a film's difficulty honestly, which is what the filter needs, but it cannot tell that Fall is A2 as a case and B2 as a legal term.
Where do the intervals come from?
From the published work rather than from taste. The opening pair, one day then six, is what Piotr Woźniak arrived at for SuperMemo in 1987, and Anki still opens at a day too. Each rung after that is about 2.2 times the one below, inside the range SuperMemo allows, and it runs to a year. Cepeda and colleagues tested 1,354 people across 26 combinations of study gap and delay in 2008, and found the best gap grows with how long you want to hold something, reaching 23 days for a one-year delay. A ladder that stopped at a month would be ignoring that. Two words learned on the same evening also get slightly different dates, nudged by a day early on and by as much as nineteen at the top, which is Anki’s trick for stopping one Tuesday’s worth of cards from arriving together forever.
Does my progress sync across devices?
Yes. Langvie asks for an account before it opens, so there is no version of it that forgets you. The spaced repetition schedule runs inside Postgres rather than on the phone, so two devices can never disagree about when a word is due.
Does it work offline?
Partly, and it is worth being exact. The app itself opens without a connection, and anything you answer is saved on the phone and synced when you are back. Your film library needs a connection to load, though, because the catalog is not stored on the device. So it is not built for a flight yet.
Is it really free? What is the catch?
It is free, and there is nothing to pay later. No ads, and nothing is sold. Subtitle files are read in memory and thrown away, so all that is kept is the vocabulary and one line for each word.
Get it on your phone.
An app icon on your home screen like a mobile app. It opens on the whole screen, with no address bar around it.
Open LangvieFree, and it takes about a minute.
- 1Open my.langvie.app in Safari
- 2Tap Share
- 3Choose Add to Home Screen
- 1Open my.langvie.app in Chrome
- 2Tap the menu
- 3Choose Install app