This is a topic about learning overwhelming content in bite sized pieces.
When engaging with a YouTube video in English I tend to scroll down and read the top comments and threads. Usually there are comedic jabs, structured responses, people chiming in with their own opinions and the best part about it is each comment can be voted so the consensus is quite easy to find.
I’ve been learning Finnish daily for almost 4 years, mostly through reading Articles, watching YouTube Shorts and listening to Spotify. (Using LingQ as my database) I’ve created over 250k cards and done more than 6000 lessons over that time.
I am planning my first trip to Finland for later this year and am trying to be as prepared as possible in advance. My goal right now is not just increasing the amount of time spent learning the language (to allow me speak freely while translating from English) but to learn more about how these people speak to each other and their general ideals and positions in 2025.
After importing and studying the video I am also importing and studying the comments section of that video.
LingQ doesn’t offer an automatic way to do this, the Rooster Video Tools has a 1 click import solution (for subs) otherwise you can utilize a command line tool like YT-DLP / YT comments API or just copy and paste the comments section into a new lesson.
Great job as always Rooster. Nice to see you talking about your personal experience, I can see you are as diligent and productive with your language learning as you are with your great technical solutions. I found interesting that you can also download the comments and it can be very useful to learn daily language and how to express opinions. People are usually quite informal there and it can certainly be fun to learn that way. All the best in your prep and keep us posted.
I use the rooster addon mainly for comments under youtube. That’s why I use rooster. Many other programs can translate youtube subtitles. But here I have it in one add-on.
Thanks for the props @Atlan
I’ve already found this method more enjoyable and memorable than just studying while watching. Do you use a similar method with your Jap studies?
Am sharing all the comment videos I import in the Finnish library, around 3-5 a day right now.
Still lots of planning to do, definitely during the Summer though.
Great that it’s going well. You’ve mentioned you use the comments regularly @atrapScA has it been beneficial with learning English?
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I’ve added an Endpoint to playground and also the lesson viewer on the website to view and download the comments. Still need the extension to directly import them to LINGQ.
I don´t really study Japanese anymore, since I got to a fluent level many years ago and have worked as a technical translator (molecular neurobiology, medicine, etc.), that´s why I don´t use LingQ for it, but I often have fun seeing the comments section. Tools like that weren`t available during my Jurassic Japanese learning period
Can your software detect different writing systems for the same language? For example, in the case of Hindi, many people don´t type in Devanagari and use Latin letters with different degrees of accuracy and variations/abbreviations on YT comments. I wonder if that could be a mess to recognize by software, though I´ve seen Google Translate and GPT being able to identify it well.
