I’m excited for the possibilities of this, but a little frustrated at the tools for finding videos currently.
The ‘CC’ button in the search bar doesn’t seem to work - I get the same videos in results either way. If there was a working tool that ensured that a search only returned results with subtitles in both the target language and the learner’s first language, that would be a huge huge help.
Please let us know when you’ve added Mandarin videos to the LLY Catalogue. I think Mandarin probably has an argument for being a language that should be prioritised as one of the first to be given the same curated treatment that English currently has on there.
Let me explain - Virtually every Chinese learning video I can find on YouTube seems to have English and Chinese open captions on screen together already, so no close captions for either (must be annoying for people learning from a different first language!) And just about every Chinese TV show on there has Chinese open captions already on screen and only translation languages as closed captions (if you’re lucky).
I’ve been scouring YouTube for suitable Chinese content that has closed captions in both Mandarin and English, but it seems that, because of the huge number of Chinese dialects, it’s completely standard for Chinese videos and TV shows to have open captions burned into the video, and as a result closed captions are redundant, so very rarely provided.
On the plus side, there are a few Chinese TV shows with Mandarin open captions and English closed captions that I was previously finding frustrating to watch because English overlapped the Chinese and I couldn’t quickly skip back to play the last caption again. In these cases LLY does at least move the subtitles under the video (if the side bar is open) and allow me to move back and forth with arrow keys. So that’s an improvement over before.