Has anyone experienced difficulty (and solutions) importing Cantonese content from Youtube and Netflix? My imports keeps saying ‘Error: No appropriate captions found’ even when there are traditional character subtitles available. Also, any success with Jyutping subtitles?
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For available “Traditional Chinese” subtitles, you can only import them under the “Traditional Chinese” language slot on LingQ, not under Cantonese.
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The difficulties are indeed well known, I don’t expect a solution to come from LingQ.
In my experience, Cantonese subtitles are typically identical to Mandarin Chinese subtitles using traditional characters, Cantonese speaking YouTubers use all sorts of language tags, e.g. Chinese, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Traditional), even Chinese (Taiwan) and occasionally Cantonese. The content isn’t any different. Even the Cantonese characters (係，唔，佢哋，嘅…) are quite rare in subtitles and the Mandarin (是，不，他們，的) versions are preferred.
To import from YouTube I often use yt-dlp
Here are some commands I use:
This channel is a good example:
Running
yt-dlp --write-sub --skip-download ‘(中字) 俄烏戰爭半年，經濟學人總結西方國家經濟制裁！雖有效但要太慢！中國汲取教訓學到如何逃避制裁！防中需提升台灣軍事裝備！《蕭若元：理論蕭析》2022-08-29 - YouTube’
Will give you a vtt file that can be imported using the “import ebook” function.
If you prefer to use a website:
It offers both, subtitle and plain text output.
Unfortunately I don’t know how to import subtitles + audio and have them sync (maybe it’s possible?). So in the end you would have have the video in a different tab or on the TV, and read along on LingQ. A split-screen setup work well for me.
By the way, I’m trying to curate a list of Mandarin and Cantonese Youtube channels (many with subtitles):
I don’t have much for Cantonese yet, but maybe you find something of interest anyways. in the future, I might import and share some of these to populate the library.
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What I think we need here, is the Whisper transcription. Supposedly support was added in the recent updates but I have tried many many times and it always says import failed. Any idea what the issue is?
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