For those of you who enjoy watching YouTube videos in your new language, we recently pushed an update which lets you import them into LingQ with 1-click using the browser extension.
You just need to make sure the video has captions (the cc indicator) and then you can click the extension to import it. It will import the video, the audio and the text. The text is often auto-generated so it’s likely not perfect. But, it is normally plenty good enough and let’s you learn from a ton of videos on YouTube.
Hi Mark,
Thank you so much for adding this great feature.
There still are some minor kinks to work out for Japanese though as each caption line is registered as a single word. This can be solved by resplitting the text in the edit window, but it would be nice to have the text split automatically.
That’s great! This will really come in handy. By the way, is there any way to add videos to lessons I’ve already created? I’ve got around a hundred episodes of some 快乐汉语 episodes transcribed and added as lessons on Lingq, but have been watching the videos in a separate app while going through the lessons. Being able to add the video and audio for the episodes would be great, and then I could even share the lessons which I can’t now since they are text only.
This is a great idea, but it still has some challenges, I think. I’ve only tried it on a few videos, but the Portuguese words were imported without accent marks. All the “new” words showed up as Blue, even though they are known words when the accent marks are included. At this point, unless I’m doing something wrong, its a great idea but not currently functional.
I was happy to see this. It’s too bad that many videos only have only auto-generated subtitles instead of subtitles that have been checked for errors, but that’s YouTube.
Import videos: when in a lesson, click on the three points in the right upper corner, then click on edit lesson and on the middle of the three boxes above the text. Now you get a pull-down menu and you’ll find the possibility, among others, to import a video.
I have tried to do this with a vlog in Italian #72 from youtube but there is an error in opening the lesson. It worked fine two times but the third time it does not work.
This feature is a flop when it does not work as intended.
What is the problem? What is the reason that it does not work?
As benscheelings says, you can click on the Resources tab when editing the lesson and add your video url there. This won’t automatically generate the audio though I’m afraid. The only way to do that is by using the import extension and then copying your transcriptions to the new lessons.
You mean you were able to import 2 videos but the 3rd video didn’t import? Or, that you tried opening the lesson the third time and that didn’t work? Are you opening the lesson from within LingQ?
Hi Mark,
This is a fantastic! idea. I have often told my friends that I think the holy grail would be the ability to have Linq-like capability on any video I wanted, so I see this as a huge step in that direction. When I got the notification I immediately went and tried it on a german-language MrWissen2Go episode. It worked pretty well, but none of the umlauts came through. I think this is the same issue others have mentioned for portugese and swedish. I am looking forward to continued improvements along this line. Thanks!
Thanks for adding this significant feature. I have tried it with an English YouTube video with complete success. I have not been able to import a BBC YouTube video in Chinese. Fellow LingQ Chinese learners, What videos have you had success with?
it messes up some letters though, like the Swedish å ä ö