u/Loose-Fly-9899

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

I originally started Y2 Reader because I wanted to make native YouTube easier to follow for language learners.

But after working on it for a while, I realized there’s another problem before that: sometimes you just don’t know what’s actually worth watching.

So I’ve been collecting native YouTube channels in different languages and organizing them by interests like space, nature, travel, science, technology, etc.

The idea is pretty simple: pick the language you’re learning, find something you’re actually interested in, and learn by watching real content instead of looking for “learning videos” all the time.

The site is free to use, and you can also keep track of what you’ve watched and save things you want to come back to.

I also built a Chrome extension that makes the videos easier to follow with reorganized subtitles, word-by-word highlighting and translation, but that’s more of an extra layer once you’ve found something you actually want to watch.

https://www.y2-reader.com/

I’m curious what kind of native YouTube content people here actually end up watching when learning a language.

YouTube captions often appear in small fragments, sometimes almost word by word, which can make fast Spanish harder to follow.

So I made an extension that reorganizes those captions into complete, natural sentences.

Then I added word-by-word highlighting, so you can see exactly which word is being spoken while keeping the full sentence visible.

I included a short demo above.

Would anyone here actually want to use something like this when watching Spanish videos on YouTube?

It’s still under active development, and I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Update: I honestly didn’t expect this many people to want to try it.
To make it easier, here’s the Chrome Web Store link:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/y2-reader/emjohemjdabapnjmhcndnlgmhjplnbjn

I've been experimenting with splitting Japanese YouTube subtitles into smaller, meaning-based chunks.

Visually, I find them easier to follow than reading a full sentence at once, especially when the sentence gets longer.

But there's one problem: my Japanese isn't good enough for me to judge this properly.

So while the result looks more readable to me, I'm still not sure whether these phrase boundaries feel natural to someone who is learning Japanese, or whether I'm just adding extra visual noise.

If you watch the short clip above, I'm especially curious about two things:

Do the chunks make the sentence easier to follow? And are there any phrase boundaries that feel unnatural to you?
If you'd split any of them differently, I'd genuinely like to know where.

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This came out of a YouTube extension I've been building called Y2 Reader. It works with videos that already have captions, then reorganizes them into natural sentences and keeps word-level highlighting synchronized with the speech.

I've been working on it since early 2025, and only recently got the subtitle experience to a point I'm pretty happy with — but this meaning-group feature is still something I'm trying to validate.

If anyone wants to actually try it, it's available on the Chrome Web Store. I also made a companion site at https://y2-reader.com with popular YouTube channels in six languages.