Pricing: $5 per month for Pro

Positives

Convenient platform for multiple video and literary sources
AI-generated explanations and examples of selected words
Many languages offered

Negatives

Transcripts from YouTube making them unreliable
Can't select phrases or collocations
Chatbot's absolutely useless
Very limited book selection
Overwhelming and confusing interface

Summary

Well-designed, impressive though somewhat overwhelming set of features for analyzing texts and subtitles. Not original and not without competitors, but a handy tool and extension.

Try Language Reactor

Alternatives

Video wrappers like Language Reactor for language learning are a dime a dozen.

Over the years, I’ve used, explored and reviewed many of them, such as Yabla, Fluentu, Lingopie, 3ears and more.

They all essentially do the same thing: source a video (usually from YouTube or Netflix), pull the transcripts, and then provide an overlay with additional functionality to interact with the video and transcripts.

They’re all reinventing the wheel, and it’s mostly a pissing contest to see who can design the prettiest UI.

Language Reactor’s a merging of two formally popular products: Language Learning With Netflix (reviewed here) and Language Learning With YouTube.

In addition to Netflix and YouTube, LR offers a small selection of literary sources (similar to LingQ), the ability to upload your own video content, and a new podcast source feature is apparently in the pipeline.

The inability to select multiple words together greatly diminishes its usefulness

Where Language Reactor and a lot of these products fail is the inability to grab phrases and collocations.

You’re limited by the fact that you can only click individual words in a subtitle, which then fetches the translation (along with AI explanations, examples, etc.).

This is fine for single words, but we don’t learn languages this way.

We learn languages in chunks.

If you can’t multi-select words in a sentence to fetch contextual meanings and then save those, then I find it mostly useless.

The only “Saved Phrases” you can get in Language Reactor are entire lines/timestamps from a transcript.

Filtering by vocabulary level is a great feature

What I do like about Language Reactor is the ability to filter videos by vocabulary level.

For example, if you set the slider below 400, you’ll get videos with extremely basic vocab (like kid’s music videos), whereas much higher (2500+) will show news and politics.

This appears to be using the subtitles to determine word frequency, though I was unable to find an explanation on what the numbers used to categorize (e.g. 8001+) actually indicate.

A helpful feature nonetheless.

The chatbot is a complete waste of time

Everyone’s building AI chatbots and conversation partners these days.

I’m yet to see a single one that’s well-executed.

The Language Reactor AI conversation partner is just lame. It’s basically a pitiful ChatGPT/OpenAI integration with no audio.

You can record yourself speaking which is nice, but the AI bot doesn’t play audio. You just get a text response.

Get the ChatGPT app and you get the same conversation partner but much better with audio.

AI explanations on the other hand

This is something that Lingopie does well and so I’m glad LR added the feature.

You click on a word while watching a video, and you get a nice little AI-generated explanation pop up in the sidebar.

In addition to the explanation, you can generate example sentences using the word in context.

If they are using OpenAI (most likely), depending on the model used, this may produce inaccuracies depending on the language, but I haven’t seen any yet.

I can’t argue with the price ($5 a month), but if I had to pay for it, I’d absolutely go with Lingopie.

It’s essentially the same type of service, but with a significantly better design and more polished features.

As for the media content, it probably doesn’t make a huge difference, since with both, you get a browser extension which can play over the top of most YouTube or Netflix videos.

There also appears to be some concern about slow or inactive development with Language Reactor (though the devs are adamant that it’s still in active development).

Overall, it’s a useful free tool for watching videos to learn languages, but would be 1000x better if you could select collocations and phrases within a sentence.