YouTubeToLingQ - turning YouTube videos into A2 German reading practice

I've been stepping up with my learning German and currently one of my favourite tools is LingQ. You can read upload text in your target language, and get an instant translation of specific words in the reader, and it keeps track of your vocabulary over time.

LingQ has a YouTube import feature, but it's not reliable and you can't pick English videos to get them in German. I wanted a way to take any YouTube video, get the transcript, and have it translated into A2-level German, which is the level I'm at.

So I built YouTubeToLingQ, a small CLI tool that:

1. Fetches the transcript from any YouTube video
2. Sends it to Claude with a prompt tailored for A2 (elementary) German
3. Uploads the result directly to LingQ as a new lesson

The whole thing is one Python script. You give it a YouTube URL and it does the rest:

uv run youtube-to-lingq "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" --lingq

Setup

It's up on my GitHub. You need an Anthropic API key and optionally a LingQ API key (free account works).