Lingopie, if you don't know (though you probably do if you stumbled upon this, as you were probably searching for reviews) is a video streaming service that offers TV series in a number of foreign languages. When you watch them, you can have them with English subtitles, subtitles for the language it's in, both, or neither. What is useful about Lingopie is that you can pause it to see the meanings of individual words, can move forward and backwards in a video according to each new subtitle, and can slow the video down if you want to make it easier.
In concept it's actually pretty decent, and I won't say I didn't get some out of it. Unfortunately, there's a big problem with it: The captions, at least for the series I watched, were sometimes off. These ranged from the minor (missing an accent) to things that actually changed the meaning of the sentence. Worse, some of these should have been obvious.
In one series I watched, a character says "Africa is over there" ("Africa está allá"). However, the captions incorrectly rendered it as "Africa está ya" ("Africa is already"). Now, both "Africa está allá" and "Africa está ya" are pronounced very similarly, so mishearing it is understandable. The problem is that "Africa está ya" is a nonsense phrase, so that should have caused the person to recognize it.
Another example is when a character says "No quiero oler eso" (I don't want to smell that). However, the subtitles wrote "No quiero leer eso" (I don't want to read that), and the English translations reflected the incorrect rendering. The two phrases, while written differently, sound essentially identical, but one should have been able to determine by context--the line preceding this was one about aroma, and the character was covering their nose when they said it--that it was the first that was in mind.
Now, my Spanish is good enough that I was able to catch a number of these, but it makes me wonder how someone who is less experienced would fare.
There were also a few mistranslations. I mostly watched it with just the Spanish subtitles so I can't comment too much on what they were like in general, but in the series I watched, which took place in the 19th century, there were references to British soldiers as "redcoats" (a term that was used for British soldiers back then). In Spanish, they were called "sacos rojos". Saco normally sack, but it can also mean jacket or coat, which is what it meant here. Confused as to what "saco rojo" meant I turned on the English and it told me "red sack" which left me still confused, but eventually I did realize it from context. Unfortunately, it seems the translator didn't, as they continued translating it as "red sacks".
I should note that I was mostly watching one series, and maybe others are better. And I did try to report the errors I saw, so perhaps someone new going in will have it better. In case anyone is wondering, it's a very loose adaptation; after several episodes it diverts from the source material so strongly that it honestly might as well have been called something else entirely. There are some things I liked in it, but on the whole I don't think I'd recommend it (though I haven't finished it).
[Update: I have since watched a few more series. It seems that the more popular series have far fewer errors in their subtitles, perhaps because more people are reporting them. If you want to use it to learn a language, I would therefore suggest sticking to one of the more popular ones.]
So I think the service is a good idea, and I like the features on the whole. But the subtitles not being fully reliable, at least in the series I watched, is a major knock on the service.
So that's my limited experiences with Lingopie. It's been a pretty long time before I put up any blog posts and I wanted to get this one out before I procrastinated on it like I've procrastinated on a lot of other posts.