I majored in English and still couldn't follow sitcoms, so I built an app

I majored in English as an undergrad and in grad school, and I still make a living with it. Embarrassingly, I still miss a lot watching Netflix and movies. I wondered if it was because I never studied abroad — but plenty of people who never left the country hear just fine, so that excuse never held.

Why sitcoms in particular

Looking closer, podcasts and YouTube channels on topics I knew went down fairly smoothly. Movies and dramas were the wall. The reason, I concluded, was simply exposure: I had barely spent time with colloquial pop-culture English. I am the type who enjoys a Google I/O keynote more than whatever is trending on Netflix.

Two things made screen dialogue hard:

1. Connected speech at full speed
2. Slang and native-style colloquialisms

Just watching more was inefficient

Watching videos straight through felt like a poor way to learn. Some stretches carry little dialogue for their runtime, and the picture tricks you into thinking you understood. So I narrowed it down to content that is “short, fast, chatty, and fun” — talk shows. A Jimmy Fallon episode has plenty of YouTube sources with good English captions, and I practiced like this:

Listen without captions → check with captions on → loop the part you missed

It worked.

The problem was the tooling

The routine was a hassle. Scrubbing back with a finger in the YouTube app, switching to a translator for unknown phrases, copying lines into a notes app. Every switch between three apps broke the study flow.

So I built one app that holds the whole loop.

The app that came out: Dollim

Dollim takes YouTube captions and lays them out as a native iOS overlay. There is a tiny delay, but in exchange caption size is freely adjustable and any line can be tapped to translate or save to a word list. Playback slows to 0.5× with the pitch intact, so the sounds you used to skim over come through clearly. The loop UI keeps getting refined through my own daily study. Local video files now work the same way as YouTube.

Grab it from the intro page or the App Store. If you don’t know where to start, the practice videos page collects captioned videos worth opening first.

I hope it helps anyone else chasing screen English the way I am. My own wish is simple: to follow English like I follow my first language before I die.

I built it to study with, so it has rough edges — but that also means it gets fixed daily. Send complaints and ideas to support@hyunsanglabs.com. It genuinely helps.