Sayover
Listen to English on YouTube, save sentences, and review them right before you forget.
An English learning tool that turns the videos you care about into your textbook. Made for Korean and Japanese speakers.
Beta link coming soon · request one at [email protected]
No sign-up · Free beta · Your data stays in your browser
Available for Chrome on desktop.
How you learn
Listen
Sayover shows one line of English captions over the video. The translation stays hidden: guess the meaning first.
Check T←→R
Stuck? Press T to peek at the translation in your language. ←/→ jumps to the previous/next line, R repeats a line.
Save S
Press S on a sentence you want to keep. Sayover saves it with the lines around it, the translation and the moment in the video.
Review
Saved sentences come back on a spaced-repetition schedule (FSRS, an algorithm that shows a card again right before you'd forget it). First hear the scene again with no captions, then see the sentence, then the translation, and rate how well you recalled it to set the next review.
Five learning principles
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Learn from videos you care about
Textbooks are dull, so few people finish them. When the videos you already watch become your textbook, you keep going every day. The more input you can understand, the better your listening gets.
In Sayover Start with any YouTube video that has English captions.
Based on The Comprehensible Input hypothesis (Stephen Krashen) · Refold's immersion-first principle.
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Guess first, translate later
When a translation is always on screen, your eyes read and your ears rest. Guess the meaning first, then check — that is how listening grows.
In Sayover You see one English line; the translation appears only while you press T.
Based on Eye-tracking research showing that bilingual subtitles pull attention to the text (Liao, Kruger & Doherty, 2020) · Delayed reveal.
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Save sentences, not words
A single word keeps its meaning but loses how it is used. Save the sentence from a real scene and you remember where and how it is used, too.
In Sayover One press of S saves the sentence, the lines around it, the translation and the moment in the video.
Based on Fluent Forever (Gabriel Wyner): sentence cards with personal context · Chunking (learning phrases as units).
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Review right before you forget
What matters in review is timing, not volume. Seeing something again just before you would forget it makes the memory last.
In Sayover FSRS (a spaced-repetition algorithm) sets the next review date for each card, with up to 15 new cards a day.
Based on The spacing effect · The open FSRS algorithm.
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Review starts with listening
Reading and memorizing a sentence trains reading; hearing it and recalling it trains listening. So each review begins by hearing the scene again with no captions.
In Sayover Review cards open in one order only: sound → sentence → translation.
Based on Retrieval practice · Listening-first review.
Backups are up to you
Sayover has no servers, so your saved data lives only in your browser. If you remove the extension or your browser profile is deleted, the data goes with it. Use [Export] in your saved list to download a backup file once a week. You can restore it any time with [Import].
Good to know
- Works on videos with English captions (uploaded or auto-generated). Shorts are not supported.
- Translations come from YouTube's auto-translated captions (Korean and Japanese).
- This is a beta. Feedback and bug reports: [email protected]
- Sayover is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.