This website is designed to provide French students an additional means of more quickly acquiring the French language via the use of video audio and ready-to-read transcriptions. It is built off the back of the fantastic
LanguageReactor tool. If you're not already using it, go visit
LanguageReactor.com and download the Chrome extension for the Chrome browser. It's completely free (although you can also subscribe to get additional features, such as being able to save an ongoing list of words & flashcard functionality). The website itself has plenty of good functionality as well, such as catalogues of French content on YouTube and Netlix.
Once you have downloaded and turned on the LanguageReactor extension, you can then watch YouTube videos or Netflix movies, with additional, and superb, translation functionality that you can't get from normal subtitles alone.
About the Transcripts
These pages are chosen from popular YouTube videos, and use the subtitles included in those videos, whether they be human-generated (by the video creator), or machine-generated (by YouTube). We then run a script to format the transcriptions to better identify grammatical points and vocabulary, as well as help readibility. This means they retain their original subtitle breaks, and errors (we don't spell-check or edit the words). Errors are more likely when the translation is auto-generated by YouTube. You can tell by the column heading whether it is Translation (= Human-generated) or Machine Translation (= YouTube-generated). Nonetheless, the intent is for you to have a transcript and translation which provides the gist of the foreign language. From that, you can use the transcription for practise techiniques, such as oral shadowing (eg. mimicking the pronunciation, rhythm, and idiomatic style of the speaker/s).
The Colors
The YouTube transcripts are then enhanced with colors by us, to make it easier to note certain aspects of useful grammar. For instance, the troublesome prépositions de and à are identified where possible, as are the genres of the nouns. In addition, certain, advanced, words are highlighted. Please note that these colors are applied somewhat ad-hoc and may change over time, for instance, when we try to improve the presentation forms. As part of this, we hope to introduce new features (such as identification by Nature of Words - verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc ). Hopefully any such changes will not detract from the usefulness.
Audio Links
Headers of the individual transcripts should all have a link back to the original video. In addition, on the home page, where the transcripts are grouped by their creator, there is a link back to the creator's YouTube channel.
PDF Generation
To get a PDF of a transcription, simply press Ctrl-P while you're on that page (Ctrl-P generally being the shortcut for "Print" in most browsers). When the popup Print box appears, change the parameters according to your needs, or just go straight to the Destination menu item and make sure it's set to "Save as PDF" (assuming you don't want to print out the transcription).
Miscellaneous Recommendations
Obviously if you find content you like, you could then subscribe to those channels, where you will find far more content than we can provide. And on the
LanguageReactor website, you can explore the menu to find an incredible amount of content, even sorted by subtitles for those channels. LanguageReactor, which was the old Language Learning with Netlix tool, is currently run as a small outfit, and continues to develop new functionality. Potentially that includes being able to categorize words by function (noun, verb, determinant, etc). You may similarly feel that for the price of about $US60, it is a project worth supporting.