[hombre_fatal]

Well, surely the idea is that anyone can watch any video in any language. Especially enabling the non-English-speaking world to consume the much larger corpus of English-speaking content.

The idea is great. They just botched it at the UI level.

In practice it means clicking a video you think is in your native language but it's actually in English with low quality auto-subs, but there's no reason Youtube couldn't improve the UX here, like indicate that it's been auto-translated or let you easily filter out content that's not in your language.

[ben_w]

If you can't turn it off, it destroys the platform as a host for language courses. I'm a native English speaker, I want the German language stuff to be presented in the original German as a way to learn German. I don't want the English stuff dubbed into German, because my German isn't good enough for e.g. PBS Space Time in German.

[tirutiru]

Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.

Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

[ben_w]

On YouTube, by far the best is Easy German. Their playlists also divide the content by levels from A1 to C2, as well as by theme: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman/playlists

They also have podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/easy-german-learn-germ...

More generally, there's also good podcast content from:

• DW news: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/langsam-gesprochene-na...

• Coffee Break German: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/coffee-break-german/id...

> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.

I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.

[andix]

Sure, but it kills the UX for people who speak more than one language. Which is probably the majority of YouTube users (outside the US).

[numpad0]

I think the idea is to eventually get machine translations just generally work, by start shooting in the general direction and pushing forward / throwing solutions at the wall and seeing which sticks. They must really not like how YouTube cross-language viewership currently work.

[lbotos]

in my feed there is a small pill that reads "auto-dubbed". Easy to miss though.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, and that's only for auto-dubbing which barely has any penetration. Most videos don't have that, just a translated title that doesn't match the audio track.