Hey all!
I am sure we all have a lot of different websites that we use for getting examples of new words that we encounter, and many of them have been mentioned on Bunpro countless times. A really famous one is Youglish, which lets you type in basically any word, and will search Youtube for videos that have that word in the subtitles, creating a playlist.
The site that I would like to mention today is filmot.com
This is similar to Youglish, but in my testing gets way way better results, and for some reason I have never seen it mentioned before either here or in the wider Japanese language learning community. I am sure someone has probably mentioned it somewhere before though…
Basically here is how you use the site.
The homepage looks like this, you can choose to search all subtitles, or only manual ones. Only manual ones will of course get the best results, but I usually just search with all.
In this case, I searched for the word うごめく ‘to squirm’, but used its kanji version to make sure I got some good examples. You’ll always get the best results with kanji, but even without kanji, you get great results. The search is sensitive to the difference between hiragana and katakana, so if you are searching for onomatopoeia etc, you’ll get better results with katakana.
Like I did here, I recommend putting the search in double quotations to make sure you only get exact results.
You’ll then arrive at a page with tons of different examples containing the text you want, like this.
Below each video is a snippet of the subtitles, so you can quickly scan things and find ones that probably use the word correctly. All you need to do is hover over the video and it will automatically play the part that has the word you are looking for, so you can just kinda bounce from video to video and get a bunch of natural examples in a very short amount of time.
If you go to the settings page, you can also adjust the settings so that it plays each video from a few seconds earlier than the target word, if you would like more context from what is being said earlier.
Personally I am yet to find a word that didn’t have many many examples, but I am sure there must be some. Compared to Youglish, it gets hundreds of times more results in most cases, so is obviously scraping its search results in a different way. I also really like the layout with all the examples on the same page like this.
Anyyyyway. Just thought a lot of people might be able to get some use out of this, and could possibly even use it for creating audio cards etc for Anki and similar things. I would hugely recommend that anyone use this when learning new words where they are not sure what kind of situation it would be used in, in real life. Instantly reinforcing something that you have just learned is a great way to give yourself a better chance of remembering it. Naturally you could use it for grammar too, as you can type whole quotes in between quotations. Enjoy!!! 