How to Set Up Your YouTube Account for Language Immersion [Step-by-step guide]
Table of Contents
How to create a separate YouTube language immersion channel (on your desktop computer)
How to create a YouTube language immersion channel on your phone
Training YouTube to ONLY recommend videos in your target language
When you’re trying to improve your target language comprehension, being surrounded and immersed in the language as much as possible is a great idea.
YouTube is no doubt one of the best language immersion resources available.
There’s loads of content available in tons of different languages.
However, YouTube doesn’t automatically recommend content in your target language.
You have to train YouTube to do this.
To make immersing in your target language as easy as possible, you need to create a YouTube channel dedicated to your target language.
You don’t need to create a new YouTube account, but just a separate channel within your YouTube account.
This hack has helped me so much in my foreign language immersion because it makes things very convenient.
YouTube suggests videos based on your location, language, watch history, what videos you have liked, and what channels you are already subscribed to.
That’s why creating a separate YouTube channel for your language immersion is ideal since it keeps things from getting mixed up with your native language.
YouTube will then only recommend videos in your target language.
Once you're all set up, you'll have an endless stream of content to immerse in.
Up next, you'll get a step-by-step tutorial (with pictures) on how to set up your own YouTube channel for language immersion.
The tutorial is using a desktop computer. If you prefer using a phone, click here.
How to create a separate YouTube language immersion channel (on your desktop computer)
First and foremost, make sure you have registered a YouTube account.
There’s no need to create a new YouTube account if you already have one. You can just use the one you have.
Once you're ready, begin with "Step 1" below.
Step 1 - Open up ‘www.youtube.com’ in your web browser.
(I’m using Google Chrome in this guide, but you can use any browser you’d like such as Safari, Firefox, etc. It might just look slightly different depending on which one you’re using)
Click on the picture icon that represents your channel in the top right-hand corner.
Step 2 - Click on Switch account
Step 3 - Click on View all channels
Step 4 - Click on + Create a channel
Step 5 - Now it’s time to give your channel a name.
In this example, we’re creating a Cantonese immersion channel, so we’ll simply name it: Cantonese
Tick the box to accept the terms, then press CREATE.
Next, we’re going to change the channel icon logo, to make it look nicer.
(If you don’t care about what the icon looks like, you can go straight to step 11)
If it looks like the picture below, it generally takes a minute or two for the channel to update before you can change the picture (once it’s updated it will look like the picture in ‘step 6’)
If you don’t want to wait, do steps 11-13 first and come back to ‘Step 6’ once the channel has updated.
Step 6 - Now that the channel has updated, click on Customize channel
Step 7 - Click Continue
Step 8 - Click on Branding under Channel customization.
Step 9 - Here you can upload a picture that you want to use to represent your channel.
For example a picture of the flag of your target language country (do a quick Google search and you’ll find tons of options for pictures).
Since we’re creating a Cantonese immersion channel we’ll upload a picture of the Hong Kong flag.
Under ‘Picture’, click Upload to select your picture and upload it.
Step 10 - Press Publish for the changes to take place.
(don’t worry, even though it says “Publish” no one else is going to see this but you)
Step 11 - Next, we’ll choose the country YouTube thinks you’re based in.
This is going to help YouTube recommend content related to that country (which is what we want).
Click the channel icon in the top right-hand corner (the Hong Kong flag in this case).
Step 12 - Click on Location
Step 13 - Click the country that best fits with your target language.
In this case for Cantonese, we’re choosing Hong Kong.
How to change your interface language (optional)
If you want to you can change the interface language to your target language.
This will make YouTube think this is your native language.
Some claim that it will further help YouTube to recommend target language content.
For me personally, I have always kept my different immersion channels in English for easier navigation. Despite this, I haven’t had any issues with it recommending non-target language videos (as long you train YouTube to only show target language videos, which we’ll talk about later in this post).
That’s why this step is completely optional and not necessary in my opinion.
However, some of you might prefer to change the language to your target language for added immersion.
Here’s how you do it:
Click on your channel icon in the top right-hand corner.
Click on Language: English (or your selected language) to change the language.
Choose your target language.
In this case we’re choosing 中文 (香港) or “Chinese (Hong Kong)”
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How to create a YouTube language immersion channel on your phone
It’s also possible to set up a YouTube channel through your phone.
Here’s how you do it:
Open up the Safari Browser and go to ‘m.youtube.com’.
Click on the aA Icon to the left of the URL bar (at the bottom).
Then click Request Desktop Website
YouTube now looks just like it would on a desktop.
Click on Sign in and type in your username and password to log in.
Now that you’re logged in, follow steps 1-13 exactly like you would on a desktop to create a YouTube immersion channel.
After that, go to the last part of this post down below.
Click here to jump to step 1.
Training YouTube to ONLY recommend videos in your target language
Now we need to teach YouTube what videos to recommend for you.
To get started, take a topic that you’re interested in, for example, “travel”.
If you don’t know that word in your target language, type “travel” in Google Translate and then copy-paste it to the search bar like the picture below (in this case 旅行)
(I added 廣東話 = “Cantonese” to make sure that YouTube doesn’t recommend videos in Mandarin, since the languages share the same written langauge).
Click on a video that interests you. You don’t even need to watch it if you don’t want to. Just press the ‘like’ and ‘subscribe’ buttons of that video and related channel.
Continue doing this with 5-10 different videos in different genres that you’re interested in and would like to watch in your target language.
Going forward, make sure to ONLY watch and like videos in your target videos.
If you watch a video in a different language by accident, just remove that video from your watch history.
There are only 3 actions you need to continuously take to train YouTube to recommend only target language videos:
Watching only videos in your target language
Liking videos (that you find interesting)
Subscribing (to channels you want to see more content from)
This will train YouTube to recommend similar content. Not only in the language you want but also in alignment with your interests and likes.
Whenever you want to watch something in English (or your native language) switch back to your regular channel (like in Step 2 where we clicked on ‘Switch Account’).
It’s easy to swap back and forth between the channels on your account at any time. This is very handy whether you’re using a phone, computer, or a Smart TV (like Apple TV or Chromecast).
If you’re learning multiple languages, you can create a separate channel for each language.
In the beginning, you will still see videos pop up here and there in English. However, the more you keep watching content in your target language the more these English videos will disappear and be replaced with target language videos.
If you see a video in English you can always click on the 3 dots and click on “not interested in this channel”. I have personally found it better to just ignore them. Instead, I just make sure to only watch content in my target language.
I have found this gives the same result in the end.
Eventually, you’ll have a YouTube that looks something like this:
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