i currently try to find youtube videos by japanese people, so i use japanese search terms. but instead of giving me video results of japanese people, it gives me videos of people from other countrys like germany talking in english about japan.. but the title of the video is in japanese for some unknown reason (auto translated by google i guess?).
i struggle really hard to find content by japanese people in japanese so i can learn with it.. since i only get “learn japanese in X days” videos or videos where people talk in german, english or other languages.. just not japanese.
does anyone know how i can find videos from real japanese people talking in japanese? is there a trick to find them? i already have changed my location and language setting to japanese in the youtube settings, but it didn’t change anything.
13 comments
Did you try to search using katakana/hiragana/kanji? If using these don’t bring you anything posted by Japanese maybe you can use a VPN that changes your IP to Japan..
Make a new account and only watch/subscribe to and search with japanese content
It depends of the search terms if you look up “study” keywords you’ll get a lot of result from people from a lot of countries because people around the world also want to learn japanese.
Maybe if you change your your region to japan and search in hiragana/katakana and kanji you’ll get actual “japanese” results. Do not type in romaji.
I just did a search typing purely in japanese and all the results are from japanese people.
Use a VPN and go to Japan.
Watch ComDot or コムドット. They are one of the most famous Japanese Youtuber group and you’d pretty much learn modern/cool Japanese that you would never get to learn with textbooks or in a formal situation. I’m native Japanese native speaker though.
Change your account’s country to Japan and it’ll make your suggested feed Japanese videos.
have you tried to search a specific topic in japanese that you want to watch?
It’s a challenge, the youtube algorithm in my experience doesn’t work that great with Japanese content, at least not without a lot of finessing, and even then it’s a far cry from English youtube.
I think part of it is that the algorithm seems to prioritize type of content rather than language.
Like if I follow a Japanese gaming channel it will recommend me other gaming channels but not necessarily in Japanese.
What I’ve been doing to curate my recommendations is just straight up flagging videos that aren’t in Japanese as “not interested” but I get the feeling that might actually be working against me and just flagging the type of content rather than the language as “not interested”.
It seems as though my Japanese youtube doesn’t really know what to recommend to me.
What I’ve found to be far better when it comes to finding new Japanese content on youtube is actually the shorts section.
Not sure why but I get way more new content recommended to me, the majority of which is in Japanese.
You can change the region settings for Youtube. On PC, click the button in the top right, the one that opens the menu for switching accounts and whatnot. One of the options should be “Region: (some country)”.
On Android, I believe the app just uses whatever region your phone is set to. IDK about Apple, but I’d assume it works like Android.
I’ve found it really is just a matter of training the algorithm. I haven’t changed my country but I subscribed to a lot of Japanese news channels and watched a lot of Animal Crossing videos in Japanese and it got the hint eventually. It stills tries to throw me some of the English language Japan vloggers occasionally but I just ignore them.
Maybe I’m just easy to please, but I have used YouTube plenty over the years, and prior to, hmm, maybe 2 years ago? 99% of all my searches and views were in English. However, over the past 2 years, I’ve used it mainly for JP content, and now it recommends mostly JP content, occasionally polluted with whatever English stuff I may occasionally search for. For example, right now it’s like 95% VTubers, Japanese weather, Japanese hiking vloggers, and Dune board game reviews and strats (in English).
I feel like if you just use it consistently enough, it does a fair enough job figuring things out. Occasionally I get a Zojirushi rice cooker ad, completely in Japanese, served to me directly from Youtube, and I think “wow, score” lol
If you still need to use YT a lot for stuff in your native language, consider making separate accounts, so you can keep them distinct.
I haven’t noticed an issue there honestly. The only thing I haven’t seen mentioned here is delete your history if you’re getting recommendations you don’t want. That works much better than the don’t recommend this button.
A couple of easy things to try that I didn’t see mentioned here –
1. Navigate to http://www.youtube.com in a new incognito window. That way Youtube will only be able to identify you by region and the algorithm won’t know your search history.
2. Do a video search using a search engine that anonymizes results. On DuckDuckGo, for example, you can choose what region to search in, so you could set it to Japan rather than Germany.