So I came across this series the other day called The Making/ ザ・メイキング and thought it would be great practice for beginners.
It shows how various products are made in a factory similar to the show How It’s Made except that there’s no spoken narration. Instead it’s narrated through on-screen text. The kanji used aren’t too complicated and for unfamiliar words they provide furigana so you can look them up on your own. There’s over 300 episodes on Youtube at 14 minutes each.
While I’m here making this thread I also wanted to add two other channels. The first is Archipel which has excellent videos of all sorts of Japanese creators talking about their work and their creative process. All the audio is in Japanese but they have subtitle translations in multiple languages. Some of their older videos have narration in French too. Whatever you’re interested in, I’m sure you can find something relevant here.
The second channel is one you may have already heard of by famous “virtual Youtuber” Kizuna Ai. She makes a lot of videos about games and quizzes but I recommend her because her videos often have subtitles in multiple languages (including Japanese which is rare!) and because she uses the variety show convention of adding words to the bottom of the screen to emphasize a statement. They can be a fun thing to practice with when you just want something in Japanese but nothing too serious. Here’s a video of her trying out a Duolingo test.
Special mention: Nihongo no Mori / 日本語の森 has excellent grammar videos particularly for N3 and up, taught entirely in Japanese. I’d definitely recommend people to check them out!
