I find YouTube to be vastly better for language learning. Good subtitles are surprisingly easy to come by, the variety of content is much greater, and you can also download the transcripts for offline study. And, perhaps even better yet, the videos tend to be short. Repetition is super important for rapid progress, and it's much easier for me to watch a 10 minute video two or three times than it is something that's 30 minutes or longer.
If you're willing to shell out some money, YouTube + LingQ (which has a plugin for automatically ripping audio+transcripts into lessons) is so effective it's almost like cheating.
YouTube appears be using ML SST subtitles most of the time and tends to trip over simple things like homonyms and at worst throws up its hands and just skips over difficult (noisy, cross-talk, etc.) segments. I say this as someone taking a 2nd language course where we'll watch a video together and do a worksheet and class discussion in that language after. Sometimes the instructor's reaction at the end will be "wow those subtitles were bad!"
Edit for clarity: the subtitles are in the foreign language, not English so it's not an issue of machine translation.
There's a lot of inconsistency, Channels like Tom Scott have remarkably good subtitles (Done by a team of humans), with different color for each speaker, closed captions and even colorfully describing sounds
Auto generated subtitles work a lot better for Video Essays and Podcasts than for TV style content (And it's really inconsistent, Spanish <-> English works surprisingly well as long as there aren't crazy accents in the way)
This plugin (Language Reactor) works with YouTube as well, you should try it.
+ Target and native captions in parallel.
+ Translate any word on hover (more on click).
+ Hotkeys to repeat, move to previous/next segment.
+ Pronounce single word.
- Moderate downside that it's not possible to select and translate multiple words.
I hardly use LingQ with this plugin, it's more immersive and much allows you focus on listening even more (which is good).
Right. It's not that most channels have good hand-edited subtitles; it's that it's not too hard to find channels that have them. Usually once you find an interesting video with subtitles, most the rest of the ones on that channel will also have them, so that can easily be tens or hundreds of hours of subtitled content to work with.
It gets even easier if you set up a separate account that's dedicated to your target language so the algorithm's not just feeding you endless content in your primary language.
To this day I can't understand Youtube's asinine decision to not let me deactivate autotranslation of titles and the fact that it isn't consistently triggered makes it so much worse
If you're willing to shell out some money, YouTube + LingQ (which has a plugin for automatically ripping audio+transcripts into lessons) is so effective it's almost like cheating.