Fleex

Fleex relies on the properly good VLC media player to be able to play any video file you choose, right out of the box. And it relies OpenSubtitles.org to grab subtitles for whatever video you decide to play. The application does this with a clear goal in mind: to help you learn English. And if you already know a bit of English, it will help you improve your vocabulary. You can learn English or work on your vocabulary by watching a video or a movie – that’s the great thing about Fleex.

At this time, Fleex is available for Windows only; but the developer is working on a Mac and a Linux version. Getting back to Microsoft’s operating system, the Fleex installer is about 42Mb in size. Download it, run it, and you’ll be presented with a setup wizard that will help you quickly complete the installation process. Run the application once it is installed on your PC and you will be invited to log in; you can quickly create an account or you can log in with your Facebook account.

You will see two things on the program’s interface once you log in: a prompt right in the middle that invites you to drag and drop a video or manually select a video to load; and a dropdown in the upper right hand corner that allows you to pick one of the many supported languages. After you load a video you will be presented with a typical media player interface that will pose no problem, not even to a novice user.

Fleex works like this. Say you want to learn Spanish. Load a movie and the application will automatically download English and Spanish subtitles for that movie. As you watch the movie, the application will present mixed subtitles, a combination of English and Spanish subtitles. It all depends on the settings – by default, Fleex displays a 50-50% mix of English and Spanish subtitles, but you can always change that ratio percentage. You can also browse through all the subtitles and view the English and Spanish subtitles side by side.

I know for a fact that you can learn a foreign language by watching movies. It is a fun and effortless way of picking up a new language. Fleex nicely bases its functionality on this and lets you enjoy movies and work on your language skills at the same time.