Hi everyone! I wanted to share the exact workflow and toolkit that helped me transition from boring textbook drills to actually understanding native Japanese TV shows, anime, and YouTube streams.

If you want to acquire a language naturally, video immersion is by far the most engaging way to do it. Here is the stack I used to bridge the gap between "beginner" and "watching native content without getting overwhelmed":

The Strategy: AJATT/ Refold / The MoeWay If you aren't familiar with The MoeWay (or the general Refold immersion method), I highly recommend reading their free guides. The core idea is simple: spend less time memorizing grammar tables and more time consuming high-volume native audio and video that you actually enjoy.

Reading Text on the Web: Yomitan (formerly Yomichan) When reading web pages, light novels, or selectable text, Yomitan is an absolute must-have browser extension. It gives you instant dictionary popups on hover so you don't have to pause your reading flow to look up kanji.

The Big Problem: On-Screen Text & Hardcoded Subtitles As great as Yomitan is, it completely fails on video players (like YouTube, Japanese TV streams, or variety shows) when subtitles are hardcoded directly into the video frames. Since there's no selectable HTML text layer, you're stuck pausing the video, guessing readings, or drawing kanji by hand into a dictionary app.

Solving the Video Subtitle Bottleneck: YuzuLingo To fix this exact issue, I built a free browser extension called YuzuLingo.

It runs local, client-side OCR directly over active web video players. When you hover over any hardcoded subtitle or on-screen text graphics in a video, it instantly extracts the text and overlays definitions, readings (furigana/pinyin), and pitch accents right on the screen without needing to pause or copy-paste anything.

Combining The MoeWay guide + Yomitan for web text + YuzuLingo for video hardsubs made watching raw Japanese content actually doable instead of frustrating.

What does your video immersion setup look like? Let me know if you have any questions or other tool recommendations!

TL;DR: I built a web app called LangGlitch that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos (and soon podcasts/graded readers) for multiple languages, starting with German, Vietnamese, and English. I want it to become a one‑stop place for comprehensible input for every language, including small/obscure ones, and would love your feedback and language requests.

Hey folks, I’m Stefan, a guy from Germany who loves travelling and getting lost in new cultures and languages. In school I was terrible at languages and grammar never really made sense to me, but at some point I realised I had somehow become fluent in English just by playing games and watching YouTube in English.

Looking back, what worked for me was basically “comprehensible input”: content that I mostly understood and actually cared about, consumed for fun rather than as “study”. These days I always try to learn new languages that way, but I kept running into the same problem: unless you’re learning something huge like Spanish or Japanese, good comprehensible‑input content is scattered and hard to find.

So I decided to build something for myself and ended up turning it into a proper project: LangGlitch – a little web app that aggregates comprehensible‑input videos for language learners. Right now it supports German, Vietnamese, and English, with playlists grouped by difficulty, tags, and creators. You can sort for “easiest”, filter for topics you like, and then just watch your way through material instead of hunting for the next decent video.

I’d love for LangGlitch to eventually cover every language out there, including the really small and “obscure” ones, so it can be a genuine one‑stop place for comprehensible input. If there’s a language you’re passionate about and want to see added sooner rather than later, tell me in the comments or message me and I’ll do my best to prioritise it.

I’ve just put it into free open beta, so anyone can sign up and play around with it. I’m planning to add more languages over time, plus podcasts and graded readers, and if it ever makes enough money to pay its own bills I’d love to commission new comprehensible‑input content for underrepresented languages as well.

If you try it, I’d really appreciate honest feedback: confusing UI, missing features, annoying bugs, anything. You can leave comments here, DM me, or join the Discord (linked on the site) and yell at me there. Screenshots in the comments so you can get a feel for how it looks.

As someone who loves both coding and learning Japanese, I’ve always wished there was an open-source, truly free tool for learning Japanese, kind of like what Monkeytype is in the typing community (fun fact: we actually have 2 Monkeytype devs on board with us now!)

Unfortunately, most language learning apps these days are either paid or closed-source, and the few free ones that are still out there haven’t really been kept up to date. I felt like that left a gap for people who just want a straightforward, open-source, high-quality learning tool that isn’t trying to milk them and/or sell them something.

That being said, I didn’t want to just make another “me too” language app just for the sake of creating one. There needed to be something special about it. That’s when I thought: why not truly hit it home and do something no other language learning app has done by adding tons of color themes, fonts and an extremely fun and customizable experience, as a little tribute to the vibe that inspired me in the first place, Monkeytype.

So, that’s what I’m doing now. We’ve already hit half a thousand stars on GitHub and reached thousands of Japanese learners worldwide, and we’re looking to grow our forever free, open-source platform even more.

Why? Because Japanese learners and weebs deserve a free and genuinely fun learning experience too.

Live demo: https://kanadojo.com/

If you wanna make our day by dropping us a star or even contributing, then you can do so here: https://github.com/lingdojo/kana-dojo ^^

どもありがとうございます！

I have been heavily slacking off with my english brush up goals in these months with my small notebook, but I have just now realized that Anki is way more comfy as I thought it would be after downloading it. However it doesn't really have a proper intermediate / advanced dictionary in my native language, but it seems some or most people seems to prefer learning new words in their target language.

So my question is this. Is it better to learn vocab by translating it to my language or purely understanding it from the target language's definitions?

By the team behind Clozemaster

I definitely feel learning a language expands your understanding of the world as you're no longer limited to just one corner of the world nor reliant on translators. It's also fun to communicate with people you would've never have gotten into contact with otherwise

Even though Chinese is a huge passion, I still lose my will to practice once in a while. What are your tips and tricks to keep it going?

I usually spend 1-2 hours. Any more than that and I get too tired. At my pace it takes about a year and a half to 2 years to get to where I can read and listen. But I reckon it could be cut down if I was spending more time a day.

I heard that training diplomats spend 8 hours a day on the language they're learning: a full time job. Imagine that. I'd be completely exhausted and my brain would be buzzing by the end. You reckon you could do that?

we all know it's popular to use music and videos to learn a language.

do you start off by having some intermediate knowledge of a language before you start using music/videos to learn and then write down any new terms? what is your process?

I am trying to use videos to learn cantonese but there is a lot I am struggling to understand.

I'm using Duolingo to improve my Mandarin and learn to read, and to learn Spanish.

Does anyone have some recommendations of texts for learners to practice reading?

My wife suggested me to use kids books, but I'd like a more motivating content than teddy bear's adventures...

I recommend this app to learn languages, especially the Romance languages. You type in the movie/TV show name in Simple Mode and read through the subtitles and match the foreign language to English. This really helps me learn languages, especially Spanish. I use Harry Potter as my main source.

I'm trying to come up with a decent study routine between two languages. I would love to hear what languages you guys are learning, and how are you organizing your time between them. What has been working for you?

Just as the post title says, is there anyone using Anki here? Would there be enough interest in making a separate Language Learning Anki community?

https://lemmy.world/c/nahuatl

https://lemmy.world/c/german

https://lemmy.world/c/geschichtsmaimais

https://lemmy.world/c/french

https://lemmy.world/c/farsi

https://lemmy.world/c/spanish

https://lemmy.world/c/chinese

https://lemmy.world/c/sichuanese

https://lemmy.world/c/lanzhouhua

https://lemmy.world/c/wenyanwen

https://lemmy.world/c/cantonese

https://lemmy.world/c/zhongwen

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreak

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreakcn

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreakjp

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreakvn

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreakes

https://lemmy.world/c/writestreakar

https://lemmy.world/c/japanese

https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/c/tibetanlanguage

https://lemmy.world/c/language_exchange

To be clear, I made the communities after /c/chinese to copy the subs from reddit I liked. Please let me know if anyone wants to mod. > c/[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/c/nahuatl