Readlang with YouTube and Netflix: what the video player does, and what it cannot

How the YouTube import works

Readlang treats a YouTube video as a text with a clock attached. You give it the link; it fetches the transcript when one is available, stores the video in your library alongside your texts, and opens it in a player where the transcript scrolls with playback. The steps are generic, because the interface moves around and the forum is the place for the current screenshots.

1. Copy the link of the video from YouTube.
2. In Readlang, go where you add a new text and paste the link instead of text. A forum thread titled "Import YouTube Link", from June 2026, is someone asking exactly where this is, so if it takes a minute to find, you are in company.
3. Wait for the import. Readlang pulls the transcript, when a transcript is available, and lines it up with the video.
4. Open the video from your library. The player shows the video with the transcript beside it; the current line follows playback, and every word is clickable.
5. Click words as you would in a text. The translation appears in place, the word is saved, and it enters the same flashcard queue as everything else you read.
6. If there is no transcript, or the one that came in is wrong, upload your own transcription for the video. Readlang lets you share it with other users.

What comes out is a listening session that feeds the reading habit. The words you clicked in a ten-minute interview go into the same frequency-ranked flashcards as the words from the chapter you read last week, and the tutorial covers what happens to them next. For a learner who already lives in Readlang, that is the appeal: listening without a second tool and a second word list.

Known limits

Three, and it is worth being clear about which are reported by users and which are simply the nature of the feature.

• The transcript may arrive as one paragraph. A forum thread from February 2026 reports imported transcripts coming in as a single block without line breaks. Following along is harder than it should be, and for a long lecture it is tiring. If yours does this, the thread is the place to look for the current state; uploading a transcription of your own is one way around it.
• It depends on a transcript being available. The import works when a transcript is available for the video. When there is none, the route is to supply your own; the pages we checked describe no other.
• It is a reader with a video, not a video player. There are no dual subtitles, no controls built for video, and no Netflix. It uses the same reader as a text, which is why clicked words are so well integrated and why anyone who wants a video tool first looks elsewhere.

The plan limits apply as in any text. Single-word clicks are unlimited on every plan; phrase translations are ten a day of up to six words on Free, unlimited and up to twelve words on Premium. A transcript of natural speech is dense with phrases, so the free limit tends to arrive sooner in a video than in a chapter; the pricing page has the details, and the Readlang guide has everything around it.

Netflix

Readlang does not work with Netflix. There is no integration, no extension that overlays it, no workaround on the forum, and nothing on the features or pricing pages about it. Searches for "readlang netflix" are almost always people looking for a different product, and that product is Language Reactor.

Language Reactor is a Chrome extension for desktop that lays two sets of subtitles over Netflix and YouTube, with a popup dictionary on click and precise replay controls. The free tier is genuinely free rather than a trial: dual subtitles and the dictionary cost nothing, which is why about two million people use the extension, at 4.2 stars on the Chrome Web Store. Pro adds saving words, machine translation and Anki export; Language Reactor publishes no pricing page we could verify, so the price has to be checked inside the app. It also imports text into a browser reader, so on a laptop it covers part of what Readlang does.

That is why the usual arrangement is both: Readlang for text, Language Reactor for video, and one review habit rather than two. The two do not compete for the same hour. The Readlang vs Language Reactor page sets them side by side in full; the Language Reactor alternative page is about the reading side and phones. The short version, with our own app in the third column:

Readlang checked at readlang.com and forum.readlang.com on 14 September 2026; Language Reactor against languagereactor.com and its Chrome Web Store listing in August 2026. Prices in USD.

Video on a phone

None of the three is a phone video tool, and it is better to say so than to let the table imply otherwise. Readlang has no native app; on a phone it is readlang.com added to the home screen, and its video player is part of that website. The forum threads we read about the player are desktop questions, and the pages we checked do not describe a phone version of it, so count it as the desktop feature it was built as. Language Reactor is a desktop Chrome extension plus a web app; it has no iOS app, and the Netflix overlay is the extension, which phone browsers do not install.

Readlang Mobile, our own app, has no video at all. No YouTube import, no transcripts, no Netflix, and this page will not promise any. It is a native iOS reader for the text half of the habit: a library of public-domain books graded A1 to C1, some narrated with the current word highlighted; web articles by pasting a link; your own EPUB on Premium. Tap a word and the translation appears in the text. By default, translation comes from Google Translate through the app's server; in Settings you can switch to Apple Translate, which runs on the device. It covers about twenty languages rather than a hundred, and it is free for 30 translations a day, with Premium at $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year through the App Store.

So the honest position is narrow. If your learning is mostly video, nothing here replaces Language Reactor on a laptop, and Readlang Mobile is not for you. If the video half happens on the laptop and the reading half happens on your iPhone, that is the case it was built for. The EPUB and PDF page covers which books it and Readlang can open; the download page explains what is and is not in the App Store under the Readlang name.

Questions people ask