SUGISAKAMASANORI

Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 10(3); December (2023), pp. 266–269
ISSN (Online): 2352-6386; ISSN (Print): 2405-9021
https://alife-robotics.org/jrnal.html

Research Article

Generating Language Learning Content from YouTube Videos
Based on Learners’ Interests
Hiroki Fxyma

Kobe University, 1-2 Tsurukabuto, Nada-ku, Kobe, Japan

ARTICLE INFO
Article History
Received 14 December 2022
Accepted 22 May 2024
Keywords
Japanese language education
YouTube-based learningLess-than-learners
Language learning

ABSTRACTThis study delves into Japanese for Specific Purposes (JSP) in Japanese language education,
adapting to the evolving landscape of language learners’ preferences. I propose a self-learning
system that leverages YouTube videos, catering to individual interests. Unlike traditional
approaches, our system enables autonomous learning by allowing learners to select preferredJapanese YouTube videos, emphasizing necessary vocabulary and grammar. Using cookingrelated videos as a case study, I analyze vocabulary usage through corpus-based methods. The
analysis revealed that while a general vocabulary presentation showing a bilingual translation is
sufficient for high-frequency words that commonly appear in multiple videos, it is required topresent the characteristic words of each video along with meta-knowledge such as collocations ofwords, clichés, and technical terms. This study underscores the potential of digital resources for
personalized language education, aiming to democratize access to language learning.
© 2022 The Author. Published by Sugisaka Masanori at ALife Robotics Corporation Ltd.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Affairs, the number of Japanese language learners wasreported to be 210,000 in 2022. However, this figure
represents only those enrolled in educational institutions,and there are likely many more potential learners.
Potential learners may include those who learn using
textbooks without being enrolled in educational
institutions, but instead of systematic learning methods
like textbooks, some may empirically learn by enjoying
content of personal interest such as social media,
YouTube, anime, and manga.
In this study, I propose a system that enables potential
learners attempting language learning based on personal
interest to watch videos of their interest while focusing
on necessary vocabulary. While several studies haveproposed incorporating YouTube into language
education (e.g. [1], [2], [3]), many of them focus oncontent for instructional purposes by teachers, and there
are few proposals for autonomous learning systems. The
objective of this study is to create a system that allows
potential learners to watch their preferred JapaneseYouTube videos and learn the vocabulary and grammar
used in those videos.

1. Introduction
In recent years, there has been growing research interestin Japanese for Specific Purposes (JSP) in Japanese
language education, influenced by the diversification ofJapanese learners and the impact of English for SpecificPurposes (ESP) in English education. JSP targets
Japanese language education tailored to various fields
and purposes such as business, medicine, and tourism. It
enables instructors to teach vocabulary and phrases
according to learners’ interests and needs. The goal ofJSP is oriented towards clear objectives and skills,
primarily targeting learners who are in a (physical orvirtual) classroom setting.
Nowadays, language learners are not limited to thoseenrolled in universities or private schools. With theincreasing exposure to multilingual information throughsocial media, the motivations for language learning arediversifying. Some individuals engage in language
learning on social networking sites (SNS) rather than in
traditional classroom settings. Additionally, many
learners memorize phrases by watching their favorite
YouTube videos. According to the Agency for Cultural
Corresponding author E-mail: saka2000@cc.miyazaki-u.ac.jp266

mysterious dishes, eating huge volumes, and videos inwhich the eating sound is played. Of these, this study will
use the “Kimagure-Cook” channel, which has the largest
number of subscribers among Japanese YouTubechannels, as its material. Kimagure-Cook consists mainlyof videos showing one man dismantling and cooking fish
and other marine products. In the fish cooking process,terms that are not used in general conversation, such asparts of the fish, cooking utensils, and verbs for cooking,appear. These words are not included in general language
instructional materials, or they are considered advanced
content. The 10 videos used in this study are listed in thereference.
As language materials, 10 videos were compiled into
a corpus, detailed as Table 1. Note that the corpus isanalyzed unformatted, assuming that learners use
arbitrary videos. (i.e., errors in speech analysis, unknown
words, etc., were not removed or corrected).

Fig. 1 The outline of the self-learning system with
YouTube (web application).
2. Method
2.1. Self-learning system with YouTube

Table 1In this project, I propose a system that learners (including
less-than-learners) to watch their favorite Japaneselanguage YouTube videos and learn the vocabulary andgrammar used in those videos. The configuration of thesystem is shown in Fig. 1.

Tokens

18,502

Types
Sentences

2,800
1,952

Paragraphs
H1 (Movies)

1,845
10

Outlines of the system
This system is planned as a web application. Learners
will select their Japanese level and input links of videos
they want to watch. In order to obtain a sufficient word
size for the co-occurrence analysis, it is desirable that thelinks be entered for approximately 10 videos of 10
minutes in length. If the video length is for several hours,
such as a video of a live game, a single video link would
be sufficient in size.

Table 2

How to use the self-study system
1) Visit the system website2) Select your Japanese language level3) Enter 5-10 links to the videos you want to watch
4) Press the [Search] button5) Learn the displayed list of words and grammar list
6) Watch the video you want to watch
2.2. Video Materials
In this study, cooking-related YouTube videos will be
used as the material for this study, with a view toward
educational practice in the food and beverage department
where the author belongs. Cooking-related YouTubevideos include various genres such as recipe, cooking,

3. Analysis and brief results

267

The output of this system is the presentation of learning
vocabulary according to the learner's level. For this goal,3.3 Collocation

the system analyzes the words necessary to understandthe video in Japanese (the original language).
There are two main types of analysis. One is thefrequency analysis of words to extract high-frequency
words, and the other is the characteristic words in each of
the 10 videos based on co-occurrence relations.

Although presenting only frequent or feature words may
have a certain educational effect, presenting collocations
may improve the qualitative aspect of word knowledge.
In this section, I propose a method of presenting featurewords together with collocations, using the vocabulary of
the Tasmanian crab and squid videos, a unique set of 10videos, as an example.
In this section, collocations of characteristic words insquid-video and Tasmanian club video are analyzed bylisting words with two or more co-occurrences as major
collocations.

3.1. High Frequency Words
Of the words that appeared in the 10 videos, the highfrequency words (set as frequency 8 or higher) were asshown in Table 2. Note that following analysis focuseson verbs and nouns.
3.2. Common words and characteristic words

Table 3. Characteristic words of each video

These high-frequency words can be categorized into
common words that appear in all videos andcharacteristic words that are unique to each video. To
identify the tendency of the words-appearance, the nouns
and verbs in the corpus are plotted by correspondence
analysis with each video, as shown in Fig. 2.

Collocation in Tasmanian club video
Take a look at the collocation of feature words in theTasmanian club video. The first characteristic word,“Tasmania,” is a proper noun and does not need to beanalyzed by collocation.
The main collocations of “爪 claw” in the second
place were ‘足 legs’ and ‘落とす drop’. The ‘足 leg’ wasused in the literal sense of “crab legs”. ‘Drop(ping)’ wasused as a transitive verb in the sense of cutting off crab
legs, claws, or fish fins. In understanding the word"claw," one may be required to have the meta-knowledge
that in Japanese, both crab claws and human fingernails
are represented by the same word, 爪 /tsume/. In
derivation, the knowledge that both foot and leg can beFig. 2. Correspondence analysis of nouns and verbs(frequency over 8) appeared in 10 videos.
Fig. 2 shows that the Tasmanian crab and squid
videos contain several characteristic words. In theTasmanian crab video, words such as Tasmania, crab,claw, and legs seem characteristic words. In the squid
videos, words such as squid, uncut, eyeball, skin, andprocessing are characteristic words. The feature terms,
based on co-occurrence relationships (by Jaccard index)
within each video are shown in Table 3.

268

resources, I aimed to create a flexible and attractive
language learning environment different from traditionalclassroom learning. In this system, learners can selectvideos of personal interest, providing opportunities for
empirical vocabulary and grammar learning. By selecting
about 10 target videos, frequently used words andcharacteristic terms included in the videos are presented,
and learners can acquire language skills related to theselected content. In this study, in addition to creating a
corpus from the videos and presenting frequent words asa method of presenting learning vocabulary, I proposed a
strategy to present information conscious of collocations.
The usage of words in YouTube videos has a uniquefrequency structure depending on the genre of the video.
Future research tasks are the presentation of vocabulary
according to the learner’s level, systematization of metaknowledge for presenting collocations, and system
implementation. The development of innovative andadaptive language learning platforms as proposed here
has great potential to democratize access to language
education and enable learners to autonomously andeffectively achieve language goals.

applied to the Japanese word ‘ 足 ashi’ may also berequired.
The main collocations for ‘捌 く /sabaku/ dress orprocess (a fish)’ were ‘思う think’ and ‘魚 fish’. The
usage of ‘思う think’ was “捌けると思う I think I candress it” or “捌いていきたいと思う I would like toprocess it,” thus no particularity as a collocation wasobserved. The co-occurrence with ‘魚’ is the expression‘魚を捌く dress a fish.’ In Japanese, ‘捌く’ is used todescribe the chopping up of fish or chicken.
“落とす drop” is the transitive form of ‘落ちる drop.’
It co-occurs with ‘頭 head,’ ‘関節 joint,’ ‘足 leg,’ and‘爪 claw’ as objects. When processing crabs, ‘落とすdrop’ is used to describe the cutting off of the legs andother parts of the crab.
Collocation in Squid video
The collocations for “皮 peel [noun]” are ‘剥く /muku/peel [verb]’, ‘状態 state’, ‘柚子 yuzu’, ‘引く pull’, ‘感
じ feel’, ‘止める stop’, ‘入れる insert’, and ‘剥けるremove’. The regular expression to remove the skin is thephrase “皮を剥ぐ /kawa o hagu/ peel off” or “皮を剥く/kawa o muku/ peel off”. A similar but less common
expression, “皮を引く/kawa o hiku/ peel off the skin,” isused when removing the thin skin of yellowtail, squid, andother fish. Derivatively, there is also the usage of “湯引き /yubiki/ hot water-peeling,” for tomatoes, peaches, andso on.
In Japanese, not only human skin, but also the skin offish, the peel of fruits such as yuzu, and the bark of trees
are described as ‘皮 /kawa/ skin’. Animal skin is also ‘皮,’and tanned skins are also pronounced ‘/kawa/ (spelled as革)’. Such metaknowledge is essential to understand theuse of the word ‘skin’ as well as ‘nails / craws for 爪’ in
the Tasmanian Club.
The two highest co-occurring words (with at least twoco-occurrences) for “剥く /muku/ peel” were ‘皮’ and‘風’. Of these, ‘風’ was used in all cases to be pronounced/fu/ (means way, not as /kaze/ for wind), which means “こんな風に剥いていきます. I will peel in this way.”Thus, the examination demonstrated that while abasic vocabulary display with bilingual translations
suffices for commonly occurring high-frequency words
across multiple videos, it's essential to provide thedistinctive terms specific to each video, alongsidesupplementary information like word collocations,
idioms, and specialized terminology.

References
1.

2.

3.

Authors Introduction
Dr. Hiroki Fxyma
He received Doctoral degree from Keio
University, Japan in 2018. His researchdomain includes application ofCognitive Science to Japanese
Language Education.

4. Summary & Discussion
This study developed a self-learning system focused on
YouTube videos, tailored to the interests of potential
learners of Japanese. By utilizing abundant online

Albantani, Azkia Muharom, and Ahmad Madkur.
2017. “Musyahadat al Fidyu: YouTube-BasedTeaching and Learning of Arabic as Foreign
Language (AFL).” Dinamika Ilmu, 291–308.
Aprianto, Dedi. 2020. “To What Extent Does
YouTube Contents-Based Language Learning
Promote an English Proficiency?” Journal of English
Language Teaching and Literature (JELTL) 3 (2):
108–26.
Riswandi, Diki. 2016. “Use of YouTube-Based
Videos to Improve Students’ Speaking Skill.” In
Proceeding of the International Conference onTeacher Training and Education, 2:298–306.

269