I’ve decided to start creating YouTube videos for large languages that are lacking in resources. The topics will be grammar, vocabulary, and cultural insights in the “pure” target language. They will have accurate subtitles in the L2, not just auto-generated.
My primary goal here is to provide learners with comprehensible input in both reading and listening. Picking up a little grammar, vocabulary, and culture along the way is sort of a bonus. We’re not trying to systematically teach grammar, for example. But personally, I find those topics to be quite interesting, especially in the beginning, which piques my attention and makes the input more digestible.
It wasn’t until I started learning Italian that I became sold on this type of comprehensible input. I noticed the channel Learning Italian with Lucrezia, a channel with lots of 100% Italian videos which I was watching to improve my listening, also had accurate soft subtitles. This made them possible to read with my reading tool, so I did, and noticed quick improvement. Then I searched for similar channels and found three right off the bat. I was hooked. I began to wonder – why don’t all languages have these? I sure could use something like this for Swahili.
There are very few Swahili learning channels in YouTube, and they all use English heavily. In addition, although it’s not too hard to find made-for-native Swahili videos, almost all of them have one of the following problems: no subtitles, inaccurate subtitles, lots of English code switching.
After about a month of preparation, I opened the channel Language Crush Swahili Videos today. I dropped three videos, and the plan is to drop two 10 minute videos per week from here on. Check it out – I’m interested in your opinions.