As a teenager, I used to find episodes of Gossip Girl on sketchy streaming sites. After clicking away about fifteen pop-up ads, the episode would finally start—if I was lucky, the video quality was bearable and there were English subtitles. Looking back, I owe much of my English skills to shows like that. One tool that would've sped up my learning is LanguageReactor—a browser extension for Google Chrome.
Once you've installed Language Reactor, you can activate it for YouTube and Netflix (the web versions) as long as the video has subtitles available. Here's what you'll see:
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Subtitles in the original language of the video
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Subtitles in a second language of your choice (anything from Afrikaans to Zulu)
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A transcript on the right-hand side
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The option to hover over words in the subtitles or transcript to see synonyms and definitions
There's even a feature that pauses the video after every sentence, giving you a bit more time to process what you just heard. It's a super useful tool that makes learning from real-world content even easier. You can try it, for example, with Dutch films and series on Netflix, or subtitled YouTube channels like Nieuws in makkelijke taal or NOS op 3.
Language Reactor has even more cool features such as saving words, but those require a paid plan.