Japanese Zero to Hero Audio-Visual

    japanese zero to hero audio visual

    Zero to Hero is an education site that helps students study Japanese and other languages with a variety of tools like dictionaries, machine translation, and "audio-visual" tools. The audio-visual section connects to YouTube videos in Japanese and lays out subtitles and English translations in a sidebar next to the video. As the video plays, it scrolls through the transcript, which you can go through and study at your own speed.

    No other tool we've seen so far gives you the ability to scroll through video transcripts like this.

    You can search for videos, or browse by topic or JLPT level. The video's subtitles and their English translations are auto-generated, the same as you'll see if you watch the video on YouTube. But with the added ability to scroll through and interact with the transcript and see side-by-side English translations, it's much easier to study. There's even a built-in, interactive hover dictionary, though it doesn't recognize word groupings or give definitions as well as something like the Rikai extension. If you want to peruse the script without playing the video, you can do that too. Click any line, and the timeline will skip to that portion.

    Though this is a helpful tool, there are some drawbacks. The furigana generated by the site is often wrong, so it's better to turn it off in the settings. As we said before, the subtitles and English translations are auto-generated. Google's speech-to-text abilities are pretty strong, but the same can't always be said for their Japanese-to-English translations, so keep this in mind when studying.

    Despite the drawbacks, there is a lot of potential here. No other tool we've seen so far gives you the ability to scroll through video transcripts like this, and students who need language shadowing material will find this site useful.

    Video
    Translation & Localization
    Dictionary
    Website
    Transcripts
    Listening