The Curious Linguaphile

Trying Migaku

Language Learning is basically my main hobby now. When I'm not doing school stuff, work stuff, house stuff, or health stuff, I'm learning languages. I co-opted all my entertainment for language learning - 80% of what I watch for fun is now in my target languages.

Partly, that's because English-language entertainment options are so formulaic and boring anymore that I just can't with it. Foreign language media has different tropes. Different storytelling styles. Different plot patterns. It's novel, and my ADHD brain craves novelty.

I also pick media that's interesting to me. Fantasy and sci-fi tends to be my go-to in English, and it's also my preference in other languages. I fell hard for 仙侠 (Xianxia) early in my Mandarin Chinese learning journey. Some of why I want to learn languages is so that I can read spiritual/religious texts in those languages. Yeah, being able to read the old stuff would be great, but I'm really interested in modern stuff. I know what is going on with modern spirituality in the English-speaking world. I want to know what's going on with modern spirituality in other realms, and I want to be able to read it myself, not through a translation. 仙侠 hits a sweet spot of entertaining, accessible language for learning, and also giving fictional, but accurate, representations of the spiritual ideas of a culture foreign to the one I was born into and continue to exist in. Also, the visuals and plots are fantastic.

Early on in learning Chinese, I discovered Language Reactor. It's been GREAT. Dual subtitles is fantastic for learning a language, especially early on when you can't understand much, if anything, of what's being said.

Today, however, I discovered another Chrome extension/app that works with more streaming sites than Language Reactor does - Mikagu (https://migaku.com/). In addition to working with Netflix and YouTube, it also works with Disney+ and Viki. Which opens up even more potential shows/movies for studying with.

I have a few different approaches for using entertainment media to study languages.

These fall on two axis:

Intensive means I'm focusing on listening and understanding what's being said. Extensive means I'm going for exposure. Active means I'm engaging with some tool to watch the media, pausing to look up words, adding words to vocab lists/Anki decks, etc. Passive means I'm just leaning back and enjoying the show, or maybe even not paying attention to it at all, it's just background noise - I listen to a lot of music in my target languages and just put playlists on as background noise all day long. I enjoy the music, and my brain gets more and more used to hearing the language.

Tools like Language Reactor and Migaku are great for Intensive Active study. They have built-in tools for looking up meanings, adding to vocab lists, etc.

I like Language Reactor a lot, but I also watch a lot of shows on Viki.com, and LR doesn't work on that site, yet. Mikagu does. That alone might make it win out for me in the long run as to which tool I use more.