The best way to learn a language is to live in it, and for most of us that means YouTube. Watch enough, and the common words stick on their own. The rare ones don’t: you meet an advanced word once, maybe twice, and it’s gone before it comes around again. Grabster is for those words. Save one straight from the subtitles, and spaced repetition and fill-the-gap practice bring it back until it stays.
Free to download · macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel
Works anywhere on your Mac’s screen: any browser, windowed or full screen
When a word you don’t know goes by, hold ⌥Space. The screen freezes, so the subtitle can’t slip away while you aim.
Grabster reads the text straight off the screen — a subtitle track, YouTube’s auto-captions, or words burned into the picture.
Let go and it’s saved with the whole sentence it came from. The translation is waiting when you look.
WHAT YOU GET
Each saved word becomes a card: its translation, a short gloss, an explanation in the language you’re learning, a fresh example sentence with its translation, and the line you actually heard it in. The subtitle is never thrown away — it’s what makes a rare word findable in your head later. Grabster then schedules the card with spaced repetition and turns it into fill-the-gap practice, so the words you meet once on YouTube get the repeat visits they’d never get from watching alone.
coup d’œil : regard rapide et furtif jeté sur quelque chose ou quelqu’un
Grabster
Elle a jeté un coup d’œil par la fenêtre avant de partir.
She cast a quick glance out the window before leaving.
j’ai fait des coups d’œil, je sais pas.
Captured context
YOUTUBE NOTES
Browser extensions work from the subtitle track a video provides. Grabster reads the pixels, so a word counts as long as you can see it: creator-burned captions, on-screen titles, text in a slide or a game a streamer is playing.
It is a Mac app, so it doesn’t care which browser YouTube is in, or whether the video is full screen. Your screenshots never leave your Mac.
…you want two subtitle lines at once while you watch. Language Reactor, a Chrome and Edge extension, does dual subtitles; Grabster doesn’t.
No. Grabster is a Mac app, not an extension. It reads your screen, so it works in Safari, Chrome, Arc, Firefox or any other browser, windowed or full screen.
Yes. Grabster reads the text shown on screen, so it doesn't matter whether the words come from a subtitle track, YouTube's auto-captions, or are drawn into the video itself.
It becomes a card with its translation, an explanation in the language you're learning, a new example sentence, and the subtitle line it came from. Grabster brings it back with spaced repetition and fill-the-gap practice until it stays.
To define a new word, Grabster sends its lookup service the word, its part of speech if known, its language, the language you read definitions in, and the nearby subtitle text. Never the screenshot or the app you grabbed from. The privacy policy has the full list.
No. Grabster has no Anki export; you review inside the app.
macOS 14 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel — one universal download, free to download.
“The words you meet once are the ones worth keeping.”
macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel