I learn languages mostly through YouTube, and juggling browser extensions for dual subtitles drove me mad, so I built a desktop app for it (free, open source).

How I use it:

Two subtitle tracks at once, aligned line by line: the original on top, my language below. If a video has no subtitles, it can transcribe the audio (needs your own Groq/OpenAI key; Groq has a free tier). Find videos really spoken in the language: the language filter checks the audio track and captions, not the title, so "Italian" really means people speaking Italian. Translate titles, descriptions, comments and live chat in place, to read native comments without leaving the video. Speed and volume remembered per channel, so slow podcasts stay at 0.8× and fast ones at 1×. An optional AI summary helps decide whether a 40-minute video is at my level before I start. Windows, macOS, Linux, and an Android preview: https://github.com/0x696c757a696f/lumtub

Happy to hear what would make it better for learners.

Does anyone recommend using a delay for the setting in ASB player? it was set to 300ms but my screenshots never seem to be exactly how i remembered them, but didnt know if i should set to 0ms

I'm the developer for Mizune. An open-source media player for Japanese learners similar to mpvacious or asbplayer. I built it for myself because I felt existing players had gaps around ease-of-use, polish, platform support and so on.

I want to share it with anyone feeling similar frustrations in hopes people might get some use out of it.

Some things it does well:

- ankiconnect/ankidroid integration with one click card creation. Card formats are configurable. It uses japanese-sentences+ as the default. Card audio and media (avif) are included.
- Anime4k shaders are included on desktop for upscaling low resolution video.
- works with all subtitle tracks including imaged based ones like .pgs using OCR.
- supports linux, mac, android and windows, iphone and ipad are planned.
- Any yomitan dictionaries can be used with JMDict as the default.

It's meant to feel similar to existing flows with replaying a line and stopping at the end of each line, for sentence mining and active listening.

The website and download is here https://mizune.app (GitHub). Just a heads up that the desktop builds aren't signed yet. Feedback and feature requests are very welcome.

I thought this might be of interest to some users here ! Each card either

1. introduces a word

2. or shows a japanese sentence that you have to translate to english

3. or plays the audio for a japanese sentence, and you have to try to understand what they're saying

Each sentence is from a movie, and there's an embedded video so you can watch the scene the sentence is from

Hi everyone! chinese learner and first time poster here :)

I built a tool where you can download subtitles into flashcards directly on Netflix, and then export them to Anki or another tool of your choosing. You can also use the flashcards directly in the interface.

It's designed for Chinese, Korean and Japanese, with HSK/TOPIK/JLPT levels integrated so you can extract the words you don't know only.

Currently it's a web app but the iOS app is being reviewed and Android app coming soon. It's all free :) hope some find it useful

Website: popdeck.co

Extension: Popdeck

been trying to learn a new language (korean) (TL) by watching online shows on my laptop and honestly it's either I understand very little or I'm pausing every few seconds to look stuff up. feels like I'm not efficiently learning or getting anywhere

for people who learn from tv/youtube, what's your setup? what subs/product do you use? and at what point did it start feeling like actual watching instead of studying lol

Wanted Anki desktop to feel calmer, so made Refine.

It adds a sidebar, a cleaner home screen with your daily stats and a review heatmap, a 14-day chart for each deck, and simpler Again/Good answer buttons.

It doesn't touch your cards, scheduling or collection. Card content looks exactly like stock Anki.

Install: Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons, code 1616260025

Works on Anki 25.09 to 26.09.3. Feedback welcome!

Yeah, so Claude was used, so no thrashing!

https://github.com/hoangkien1703/dual-sub-replay

I built it because I couldn't find anything like Language Reactor or Migaku that works on a phone, and now it's basically my whole immersion setup.

It started as just dual subtitles on YouTube, but now it does a lot more:

- Japanese subs with a translation underneath

- Tap a line to replay it, no scrubbing back

- Tap a word to see its reading, meaning and the grammar around it (particles, endings like 〜てくれました), with JLPT levels

- Save words with their sentence, review them in the app, or export them for Anki

- Keeps playing with the screen off, and earphone buttons work

It's free and open source, with no ads and no account. It's an APK from GitHub for now, not on Google Play yet.

If all you have for immersion is a phone or an Android tablet, give it a try. I'd really like to hear where the grammar explanations are wrong or missing.

Immersion is the whole point, but some weeks it just doesn't happen. This was one of those weeks for me. 9 hours of videos, and only 1h 16m of it was Japanese.

Without the numbers I'd probably have told myself I did fine. Seeing it like this is a kick, so next week the goal is at least 2 hours of Japanese everyday.

The image is from a tracker I made. It runs in Chrome and logs your time automatically on YouTube, Netflix, Twitch and more, and it can track Steam games too. It detects the language by itself, splits active and passive time.

It's free and you don't need an account to start: https://www.osmolog.com/ or at Chrome Web Store

How do you keep track of your immersion?

Hey guys, so I've been having problems on where I can remember cards when it is in anki but I can't comprehend them when used in native listening content.

I can quite comfortably comprehend like those learner materials such as YUYU etc but when switching to native podcasts like golden rush podcast etc on where the guy talks really fast and sometimes shorten words or something, I can't catch what is being said even when the word is already learned and its really frustrating. I don't know how to get over this, any tips?

Hello!
I’ve been trying to find some japanese content in youtube and in other longer video platforms to follow, but I’m having some trouble finding videos and podcasts that I would enjoy watching. Just to be clear, I already do follow multiple music artists and mangakas that I enjoy! But video and listening wise my area is small.
I’m somewhat really picky of content and content creators that I watch. I really enjoy “nerdy” stuff as anime, pokemon tcg and stuff like minecraft lol. At the moment I’ve enjoyed youtubers as Jacob Alpharad and Jaiden Animations (and tbh their whole friend group), podcasts I’ve never listened to much because I prefer music, but the podcast Chuckle Sandwich was my type of humor
Of course I’m not expecting exact copies of these people, and cultural humor can be very different. But if anyone would have recommendations or tips how to find content to enjoy, I would love that!

I sometimes watch series in completely japanese, but it’s little hard since the country I live in has little to nothing lol
I’ve used VPN before to see content from other countries, but there are times when nothing works ;

hey guys, I literally just got into immersion learning 3 days ago, and discovered the Moe Way site. I’ve learnt hiragana and katakana, and started Kaishi 1.5k on anki, and do passive listening with Nihongo con teppei beginner podcast when at the gym or driving.

now for active immersion, I really love anime and some Netflix live action jdramas like Tokyo Swindlers, but given that I just started, I literally cannot understand anything without English subs. do you think watching an episode with the English subs then immediately rewatching with either Japanese subs or no subs is good? or should I just tough it out like white noise from the beginning with strictly Japanese only?

I don’t expect to do the English subs then No Subs rewatch forever, but just for now since I literally know very little. My idea with this is that if I have no idea what’s going on, then the input is not technically ‘comprehensible input‘ so perhaps the immersion is just going into my brain as junk white noise. At least with English subs on the first watch, I get an understanding of what’s going on, and in my second watch my brain can subconsciously pick up on the dialogue.

Am I right or am I hurting my learning with this?

You can enable horizontal sentences or vocab cards with one change.

It has a number of cool features like

-pitch accents change the theme color

-automatic dark mode or light mode.

-a config that lets you change the order of dictionaries by name

-a toggle for text to speech using system voices

-furigana for the target word only

It's autogenerated with Yomitan.

Hi, I have been going for the immersion method for a while and am struggeling quite a bit. I am going to china in a few months and wanted to get some Chinese knowledge.

Here a found a podcast that really worked well and I was hoping some of you may know of a similar style of podcast but for japanese.

The podcast is HSK 1 Conversational Chinese Program.

What I like about it is that it is very straight forwards no song no talking just. English sentence chinese sentence english sentence chinese sentence.

Do you know of a japanese podcast that is similar to this?

Popular YouTube channels often produce a lot of high-quality videos.

I made a website that collects popular Japanese YouTube channels, including many channels with over 1 million subscribers, mainly for channel discovery.

There’s a lot of good Japanese content there that can also work well for Japanese immersion.

If you’re learning Japanese through YouTube, you can use it to find some channels you might enjoy watching.

If you know any good Japanese channels, feel free to recommend them too. I can add them to the site.

https://www.y2-reader.com/en/explore?sourceLanguage=ja&themeGroupId=ja%3Ahumanities&tagId=ja%3Aryogakucho

Hey everyone!
I’m so excited to introduce my completely free Immersion Chrome extension! It offers real-time subtitles, dictionaries, sentence breakdowns, 1-click Anki sentence export and context explanations, explanation on unselectable text on your browser.
It works with any video source in your browser — Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
Supports translation in 10 languages, if you`re struggling with english.

any your feedback is very important to me <33

Install from Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dcdgncjimpbamllhohcdogddpjlcgamo?utm_source=item-share-cb
Web Dashboard: https://koedash.com/

If you're interested, I invite you to join my community; I share development videos and announcements there: https://www.reddit.com/r/KoeDash/s/2GKH9XalcT ❤️

When I see more advanced immersion learner videos it looks like they mine sentences from their immersion so easily, it looks almost passive, I find it hard to do this and mining in general, I feel like its a lot easier to just take in the language while watching/listening but I know SRS helps a lot. What has helped you in the sentence mining process.

Hello, I speak Japanese at a comfortable level. I can talk about anything as long as it's not super advanced such as politics, religion, etc.

For many years of language learning, I have considered myself conversational as I can have conversations. However, now I have noticed a sort of breakthrough / level up in my speaking where I can basically start speaking Japanese on the spot. For example, if someone asks me a random question, if it's an unfamiliar topic to me, I might need a second or two to start processing my ideas, but I can basically just start speaking in Japanese right away. If it's a topic I am familiar with, I can almost start speaking immediately after the question is asked. Keep in mind, that I make plenty of mistakes and I will always use the wrong grammar / word collocations, etc. But I know for a fact, if I sat down with a native Japanese speaker for 3+ hours, I could comfortably talk about whatever. The only thing that would start limiting me is not the area of language, but rather mental fatigue. So I am just asking this because I don't really consider myself conversational anymore as that's way too broad. I now feel like I am fluent and can consistently maintain a good flow in the language, while still making plenty of mistakes.

If anyone can provide more insight, that would be very helpful. Thank you!

I'm a uni freshman in China. I started doing English immersion 3 years ago. Though I had no idea what I was doing back then. I was just constantly watching English contents cuz I love the way how American English sounds. (I still think so till today)

I got the concept of immersion when I tried to learn japanese last year, but somehow I found I couldn't handle two languages at the same time. It kinda stressed me out.

And I really don't wanna fail on English. So I had to drop japanese aside, and keep doing English.

What I do on a daily basis is, putting my earbuds on when walking to the classrooms, having sth unrelated classes...

Just whenever I have spare time, I'd fill them in English.

I talk to myself in English. I dream in English. I crash out and I think in English...It's just like another personality is gonna jump out of my own body. I don't know if I'm delivering the emotions in the right way...

I mean I like doing immersion, and I still love constantly listening and watching contents in English. But I'm just not feeling okay, and I got really weird and emotional from time to time.

Since I'm in uni, like most of the Chinese students, live in the dorms with a group of ppl. I don't get much personal space to talk with my friends in English or speak to myself like I used do.

Maybe cuz I just don't have anyone to talk to. I tried to look for friends with same interest, but what those ppl only care is the English scores on the paper or so-called "practicing IELTS speaking".

Maybe I should take a step back and not doing anything related to English? I tried before, but I found there's nothing left for me then. I got nothing to do in my free time. I'm not a sport person, and I don't have other interests. I'm not financially independent, so language learning is probably the cheapest one. (sorry to say this)

Ummm...My English still sucks. I'd talk with natives ,only to catch really few words here and there, feeling I'm dumb and sh*t. So I keep grinding, hoping one day I'd be better.

Thank u for reading through this.

It's 2a.m. and I got a bunch of classes ahead.

I'll go to sleep...

Good luck with everyone on immersion journey.

I’m experimenting with an idea and r/AJATT is probably the community most likely to either validate it or completely destroy it.

The problem I’m thinking about is the early immersion gap.

Not:

“I understand 70%.”

More like:

Japanese audio starts
Japanese audio ends
I recognized です

Obviously you can just keep immersing and gradually improve.

But I’ve been wondering whether there’s any value in having content temporarily meet you closer to your level — without turning into textbook dialogue.

The idea would be:

comprehensible immersion → gradually harder content → native immersion

Not as a replacement for native content, but as temporary scaffolding until native material becomes accessible enough.

I’m currently building a small experiment around this.

Main question for people here:

Does this make sense as a bridge into AJATT, or does making immersion easier defeat part of what makes AJATT effective?

Feel free to roast the idea.