About LinguaRamp’s video catalog
A catalog of YouTube videos with real Chinese captions, each scored with the same difficulty system as the LinguaRamp app and browser extension, so you can find videos you can follow at your level.
How difficulty works
Level
Our Chinese word list ranks every word sense by how common it is. A Level is 100 of them: Level 1 is the 100 most common senses, Level 2 the next 100, and so on up to Level 236.
The 95% rule
A video’s difficulty is the smallest Level whose words cover 95% of the words spoken in it: roughly one unfamiliar word in twenty, the coverage that research links to comfortable listening. The video page’s Vocab coverage chart also shows the Level needed for 50%, 75%, 90% and 98% of the words.
Intermediate · 32: Difficulty is estimated from vocabulary: knowing common words through Level 32 covers about 95% of the words in this content — roughly 1 unfamiliar word in 20, the coverage research links to comfortable listening. Level 32 sits in the Intermediate range.
A channel’s difficulty uses the same rule over all its videos’ words added together.
Tiers
Levels are grouped into tiers, named for the range of Levels they span.
| Tier | Levels |
|---|---|
| Beginner | 1–6 |
| Elementary | 7–12 |
| Pre-Intermediate | 13–23 |
| Intermediate | 24–40 |
| Upper-Intermediate | 41–61 |
| Advanced | 62–236 |
Beyond ranked vocabulary: Many of this content's words are outside our ranked vocabulary list — specialised terms or name-like words — so no level reaches 95% word coverage.
Difficulty is estimated from vocabulary only. Speech speed (syllables per minute), accents and what is on screen matter too, which is why each video lists them next to its difficulty.
How videos are chosen
- YouTube only, and only videos whose channel uploaded its own manual Chinese caption track. Auto-generated captions are never used.
- Channels are picked by hand: channels made for learners, and everyday native channels (cooking, vlogs, tech, science, stories, travel). No news, politics or studio dramas.
- Each video’s captions are downloaded once to score it and are kept privately so the numbers can be recomputed. We never show or serve the captions on this site.
- Every number on a page is computed ahead of time from those captions with LinguaRamp’s own word list.
Channels in the catalog
Credits
- CC-CEDICT — the word meanings under “Words to learn first” are CC-CEDICT definitions, shown verbatim. By the CC-CEDICT contributors, via MDBG; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
- complete-hsk-vocabulary by drkameleon — the HSK 3.0 word lists behind each video’s HSK coverage. MIT License.
- TBCL vocabulary (臺灣華語文能力基準), the vocabulary list published by SC-TOP — the TOCFL word lists behind the TOCFL coverage of Traditional-character videos.
- SUBTLEX-CH word frequencies (Cai & Brysbaert, 2010), used to split text into words. About SUBTLEX-CH.
- Unihan-derived Hanyu Pinyin readings, for the pinyin of words to learn. Copyright © 1991–2026 Unicode, Inc.; Unicode License.
- Jiten (jiten.moe) — our caption ingestion ports Jiten’s yt-dlp and subtitle logic, rewritten for Mandarin. Jiten is licensed Apache License 2.0. Jiten’s own data is not used.
- YouTube — videos, titles, thumbnails and captions belong to their creators. Videos play in YouTube’s embedded player. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube.
Takedown
If you run a channel listed here, you can ask for the channel, or any of its videos, to be removed from the catalog.
Terms
- This site shows statistics about public YouTube videos. It does not host, show or sell any video or caption.
- Videos play in YouTube’s player or on YouTube, under YouTube’s Terms of Service.
- Difficulty and the other numbers are estimates from vocabulary, provided as they are, without any warranty.
- Word meanings are CC-CEDICT definitions under CC BY-SA 4.0; reuse them under that licence.