this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Rakuten Viki removed learn mode, now what (hexbear.net)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is extremely cringe.

Rakuten Viki (a platform that has all kinds of Asian TV shows) used to have a feature that allowed you to watch videos with 2 sets of subtitles at the same time, which was ideal to learn languages. But for some reason, they just got rid of that feature?

Now there is "Language Reactor", which is a Chrome add-on that allows you the same feature on other platforms like Netflix, but none of those platforms have an even remotely decent catalogue of shows from mainland China (it's probably perfectly sufficient if you wanna learn Korean though). It's also a Chrome add-on and I'm using Firefox.

I'm looking into ways to pirate the shows and then add 2 layers of subtitles myself, which is probably gonna be a huge hassle because torrent hubs also don't seem to have many shows from mainland China.

Does anyone have a somewhat convenient way to a) Watch Chinese TV shows and b) Watch them with both English and Chinese subtitles? I specifically found this show I thought looked cute named 以家人之名 and it's on Rakuten Viki but alas, I can only watch it on there with either English or Chinese subs, not both simultaneously. And from my experience, you don't learn a lot at all when just reading English subs, especially with how difficult Chinese is from a listening comprehension standpoint.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

One thing that surprised me is how a lot of Chinese shows will be uploaded to youtube even with English subs, by seemingly legit channels. E.g. here's 以家人之名.

Viki likes to find versions without hardsubs, but everywhere else usually has Chinese hardsubs in my experience. This means you can get a learning mode even on youtube.

For versions with softsubs, I use mpv which has a mode that puts secondary subtitles at the top of the screen. It can integrate natively with yt-dlp.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunate about hardsubs that you can't easily ctrl + c them to look them up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Maybe I'm coping, but I find it smoother to just have my phone up to manually type pinyin into pleco and it acts as a natural hearing comprehension test. If I fail that, I still have the characters shown on the video so there's now a bonus handwriting test nerd

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Viki did that?!

Ugh, I still have yet to learn Chinese (trying my hand at Spanish right now, which is more important for someone like me).