Learn a language from anything you watch

Study what you actually want to watch

Drag in a video or an audio file, or paste a link and choose the quality. Subtitles the video already has, in the file or on the site, are used as they are; without them, Paralign transcribes on your Mac. Subtitle files import in any text encoding.

• When a video's subtitles and the transcript disagree, you see the differences side by side and choose; small ones are settled for you
• Every word is aligned to the audio, so loops, word audio and dictation are exact

A player made for listening closely

The original line, its reading and the translation on the video, each one shown or hidden on its own; the translation stays blurred until you want it. Loop a sentence, pause at the end of each one, slow down without changing the pitch, and follow along in the sentence list.

• Furigana for Japanese and pinyin for Chinese: always, only for words you have not learned, or never
• Watch, close listening, shadowing and dictation presets; every control has a key
• Translations by the local AI or by macOS, offline

Click any word

A card shows the base form and reading (食べられなかった → 食べる, with how it was conjugated), the dictionary entries, and what the word means in this sentence, written by the local AI. Hear it from the video itself, in a system voice, or open it in the macOS dictionary.

• Fix a reading or a word split once, for this sentence or everywhere
• Dictionaries for English, Japanese and Chinese download as small language packs

Every word keeps where you met it

Save a word and Paralign keeps the sentence, its translation, the clip of audio and a still from the video. Saved words are highlighted in every video by how well you know them, in any form they take, and sentences can be saved too.

• New, learning, known or ignored: one state per word, everywhere
• Filter, search, add notes and jump back to the moment in the video

Review with drills made from your own clips

FSRS spaces your reviews so each word comes back just before you would forget it. The drills use the audio and sentences you saved, and get harder as a word sticks: flashcards, listen and choose, choose the meaning, fill the gap, put the sentence back in order, and type what you hear.

• Review everything due, one video, or the words you keep missing
• Undo, a daily limit for new words, and a streak

Say it back, or write it down

In shadowing, Paralign pauses at the end of each sentence and records you, then plays the original and your take one after the other, with both waveforms and pitch curves to compare. In dictation the subtitles are hidden: type what you hear and every word is marked right or wrong.

Ask about the video, on your Mac

A local model summarises the video and splits it into chapters, answers your questions with timestamps you can click, and explains the grammar of any sentence. It runs on your Mac, so it is never metered.

Take your words and subtitles with you

Send your words and sentences to Anki as a deck package, through AnkiConnect or as a CSV, with the audio and stills, and export again without duplicates. Subtitles export as SRT, VTT (with readings), ASS or TXT, in one language or both.

• MP4 with soft subtitles in both languages, without re-encoding
• Open the video and its subtitles in CaptionCraft to burn them in