How to track your immersion hours on YouTube, automatically

Most people who track immersion hours start with a spreadsheet. Most of them stop within a month. Not because the idea is wrong, but because a spreadsheet depends on the one thing an immersion habit is trying to remove: remembering to do something after the video ends.

What a tracker has to get right

Automatic tracking sounds simple, count the minutes, but the details decide whether the number means anything.

Count from the player, not from a clock. The obvious approach is a timer that runs while a tab is open. It is wrong in both directions: browsers slow timers in hidden tabs, so the ten minutes you listened while cooking becomes two; and a laptop that sleeps mid-video keeps the timer’s memory of the whole nap. Reading the player’s own position every second and crediting the difference fixes both. A hidden tab keeps counting because the player keeps playing. A nap credits nothing because the player didn’t move.

Exclude what isn’t input. Ads, pauses, buffering and skipping around. A tracker that counts an ad break has quietly added a few percent to every number you’ll ever see, and you cannot detect it afterwards.

Know the language. This is the one most trackers skip, and it is the one that matters. A Japanese learner’s YouTube session includes English recaps, an English tutorial they got distracted by, and a Japanese video with English commentary. Counting all of it as Japanese is how a log drifts from the truth. The tracker needs to hear the audio and decide, and, just as importantly, it needs to admit when it isn’t sure rather than guess.

Keep the receipts. Store every stretch of time separately, with the video it came from, so you can see what was counted. A single running total that you cannot inspect is a number you have to take on faith.

Setting up Kiku Hours

Kiku Hours is a Chrome extension built around those four rules. Setup is two questions.

1. Install it from the Chrome Web Store and open the side panel from the toolbar icon.
2. Say what you’re learning, and what you already speak. It never guesses either from your browser settings, because a browser’s language says what you read, not what you speak.
3. Press play on YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Vimeo, Dailymotion, TED, Bilibili or Niconico.

From then on the panel shows today’s total counting live, the last seven days, and every video listened to today with its minutes and language. A language label appears after about a minute of listening, once two separate checks agree. Video in a language you already speak is recorded but held out of the total, and the held-back amount is shown next to the number it came out of.

What it deliberately doesn’t do

It doesn’t run on streaming services that encrypt their audio, so Netflix and Crunchyroll are out. It’s built for Chrome; in other browsers it still counts time but can’t label the language. And it doesn’t tell you whether you understood the video. That judgement is yours. Its job is to make sure the number you write down next to that judgement is true.

The spreadsheet, if you want one anyway

Everything it records can be exported as a spreadsheet, one row per interval, with the video, the time and the language. If you like your own charts, keep them. The part worth automating was never the chart. It was the counting.