Yunit – Learn a language as you read and watch YouTube

A calm browser extension that translates a few words on every page you read, so vocabulary travels with you across the web. yunit is in beta. Everything below works today, and it is all still changing. Features, limits, and prices may move while we learn what readers actually need. yunit reads alongside you. While you scroll through articles, watch a video with subtitles, or drift through a feed in another language, it picks a small handful of words you might not yet know and tucks a tiny translation above each one, the way a student pencils a note in a margin. The sentence stays intact, the line below stays open, and reading remains the priority. It goes both ways. On pages in the language you're learning, translations to your own appear above the words you don't yet know. On pages in your own, fragments of the new language drift in beside the familiar, so even your everyday reading begins to teach you a little, almost without your noticing. You don't have to do anything for this to work. Read what you actually want to read, in either language, and the new vocabulary slowly grows familiar from being seen. A collection gathers in the background, each word held alongside the sentence it arrived in, and yunit threads these back into your reading at the moments they need to be seen again. When you feel like leaning in, a single click on a word that stopped you cold opens the full note. A precise translation, the surrounding line, a definition, the sound of it spoken. Then it goes quiet again, and you keep reading. Give it more of your attention and the rhythm moves faster; give it less and the pace stays gentle. Either way, the words travel with you. Reading Annotations land where you are actually reading. A few per screen, the rest of the page left untouched. You set the density yourself, from a single annotation per screen up to a dense reading aid. When you would rather see a passage in two languages, press Alt+Shift+D to switch into dual reading view. Two modes. A quiet inline gloss under each line, and a side-by-side mirror where the original sits next to the translation in two columns. Languages You can learn Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish or Swedish, and read the translations in any of twenty-eight languages. Arabic, Hebrew and Persian read right to left. When you install yunit, it asks how well you already read the language you are learning, and picks its words from there. For a class, a teacher can make one link at yunit.app/start that sets both languages for every student who opens it. Keeping words and phrases Click any annotated word and a small panel opens beside it, with the translation, the sentence the word came from, a definition, and a pronunciation icon. Keep the word with one click and the sentence comes with it. Select any text on the page, a phrase, a clause, a whole sentence, and yunit offers a translation in a small floating panel. From there you can keep the phrase, or keep the individual unknown words inside it. This works on any page where text is selectable. Words that come back Kept words return on a schedule the extension works out for each one. Most of the time they simply appear again in your reading, translated, a quiet second meeting. Now and then one arrives as a small question mark instead. Try to remember it, click to check, and say how it went. A few of these a day at most; reading never turns into a quiz. Words that stop appearing on their own have a place too. Your lexicon page offers a short review session, one card at a time, built from the very sentences you met each word in. And as your collection grows, the lexicon can tell you roughly where your reading stands, from the frequency of the words you keep. The lexicon page can also write your words to a file for Anki, with each word, its meaning and the sentence it came from. You can mark a word as known at any time and yunit will stop annotating it. Hover any kept word on a page to hear it spoken in your target language using your browser's built-in voice. YouTube lyrics On YouTube videos, an optional lyrics panel fetches the song lyrics and aligns them to the timeline. As the song plays, each line is translated alongside the original. Premium adds a per-line sharpen toggle that retranslates the lines where idioms or wordplay get lost in standard machine translation. Dual subtitles On any YouTube video that has captions, dual subtitles show each caption with its translation beneath it, in the same lettering as the lyrics, translated on your device. Turn them on once in the popup, in the player menu, or with Alt+Shift+S, and every captioned video has them. They step aside while live captions or the lyrics overlay are on the video, and come back when those stop. Live translated captions Premium adds live captions on YouTube for videos that have no subtitles at all. Click once and the spoken audio becomes two caption lines over the video, the original language above and yours beneath, following the speaker in real time. A transcript builds beside the video as it plays, each line timestamped so you can jump back to it, and words in it can be kept like words anywhere else. Live captions run on Chrome and Edge on a computer. In the player On YouTube, a small yunit button sits in the player's own controls, next to the caption button. It opens a short menu for live captions, dual subtitles, lyrics, dual-language reading, and annotation density, each with its keyboard shortcut beside it. It stays with the video in theater and fullscreen. Per-site control Disable yunit on specific sites, or run it only on an allowlist. Useful for the page where you draft your own writing, the search results page where you do not want help, or the corner of the web that is in your own language already. Free account, optional The extension is fully usable with no account at all. Everything described above, apart from live capti…