Essentially, the core of this approach is that audio cards made from native audio will get burned into your brain as earworms. And you'll train your brain to understand actual native audio (as long as it's reasonably clear). And remarkably, I can still understand many of my Anki Spanish cards after 5-8 years of total neglect. It's as burned in my brain as a popular song from high school! But the drawbacks are legion: You need accurate L2 subtitles, you need to be able to convert a TV episode or movie into video file, and you need to be pretty good with various geeky tools. And you need to have good Anki card formats and deletion habits.
Trying Language Reactor. Language Reactor seems to be frequently mentioned as a good tool for studying YouTube and Netflix videos. Let's try it out.
First, here's a French video that's still a good exercise for me. The woman in the video speaks rapidly and idiomatically, and I don't actually get everything on the first try. (At least not without a warmup.) Here's what it looks like:
I can set my vocabulary size, and Language Reactor will helpfully mark words I might not know. I can play the video, look at the French and English subtitles, and mark either words or phrases to be studied later. Note that the YouTube captions contain as many errors as usual:
That caption should almost certainly be j'avais peut-être envie de passer le concours d'avocat!
There's also a browser plugin, which works with Netflix. In the video I tested, the Netflix captions seem to be more accurate than YouTube captions. But the translations are a very loose match at best.
The flashcard support. I was optimistic I was going to like this. But my hopes were dashed quickly. Yes, your marked phrases will be automatically turned into flashcards, which look nice enough:
But the flashcards don't use the original audio! Instead, they use synthesized audio clips, which are based on the (often incorrect) YouTube captions. Compared to Subs2SRS, this is nearly useless. If you are going to use it, at least use it with Netflix content, which seems to have professionally transcribed captions.
And yes, there's an Anki export feature, but it uses the same synthesized audio.
How to make good Subs2SRS flashcards. Here's an example of how to do this right (at least in my opinion):
There are several things worth mentioning here:
- The front of the card contains a still image (for context) and the original audio.
- The audio clip is padded with 1.5 seconds of sound before and after the subtitle's display time. This provides a bit more context, and it also helps salvage cards where the subtitle timing was off. 1.5 seconds may seem like too much, but once I started doing this, it vastly reduced the number of ruined and frustrating cards.
- The back of the card contains bilingual subtitles. These include the preceding and following subtitles, too, because oftentimes the subtitle won't make sense on its own.
Conclusion: Language Reactor is a pretty good tool for watching Netflix! And it can be useful for YouTube videos, provided the captions aren't too bad. I like the vocabulary size estimator and the ability to mark words and phrases. This could be a very useful tool around B1 and B2, and it could be used in a variety of flexible ways.
But unfortunately, both the built-in flashcard tool and the Anki export feature use text-to-speech audio, and they appear to miss a variety of important tweaks that make good Subs2SRS cards amazingly useful. So this is not yet my dream tool. Perhaps one day!