How to Use YMM4 in English: Switch the Language and Find Your Way Around

YukkuriMovieMaker4 (YMM4) is a free Japanese video editor, best known for “Yukkuri” videos: commentary and let’s-play videos in which round-headed characters talk in a synthesized voice. It is a capable editor in its own right, with a timeline, text, video, audio, effects, transitions, and support for many text-to-speech engines.

YMM4 opens in Japanese on a Japanese PC, but it has an English interface built in. This page shows how to switch the language, and then walks through the English interface: the main window, the menus, the item types, the settings, and the effects. For each label I also give the Japanese original, because the official documentation and almost every tutorial are in Japanese.

Switch YMM4 to English

The language setting is in the Settings window. While the interface is still in Japanese, follow the red boxes:

1. Open the first menu, 「ファイル(F)」 (File), and click 「設定」 (Settings). It has a gear icon and sits just above the last entry, 「終了(X)」 (Exit).
2. The Settings window opens on its first page, 「全般」 (General). The fourth row from the top is 「言語（要再起動）」 (Language, restart required). Open the drop-down and choose English.
3. Close YMM4 and start it again. The setting takes effect after the restart.

In v4.57.0.1 the drop-down offers 「デフォルト」 (Default), Arabic, English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Indonesian. On my PC, which runs Japanese Windows, Default gave me the Japanese interface. I have not tested YMM4 on an English-language Windows, so I cannot say what Default shows there.

To switch back later, go to File → Settings → General → Language (restart required).

What stays in Japanese

After the switch, the menus, the toolbars, the item panel, the Settings window, Character settings, the export window, and the names of the effects were all in English. These were the exceptions I found:

• The names of the built-in characters and their voices, such as ゆっくり霊夢 (Yukkuri Reimu) and AquesTalk’s 女性1 (“Female 1”). These are data, not interface labels, and you can rename characters in Character settings.
• One entry in the Tools menu, MCP連携サーバー (“MCP integration server”). Two more are shown in both languages: Browser / ブラウザ and Notepad / メモ帳.
• One speech engine in the Settings list, よみてれる (a product name).
• The buttons of the “Do you want to save it?” dialog: はい(Y) is Yes, いいえ(N) is No, and キャンセル is Cancel. The message itself was in English. These buttons probably follow the language of Windows rather than YMM4.
• The official documentation (FAQ) and the release notes.

The English interface is a community translation — the Settings window has a Join to translation (Google Sheets) link — so a few labels are rough. For example, the Edit menu has “Swith control point visibility” and a lowercase “redo”, and under Align selected items the entry “Align items to left” appears twice; the second one (third in the list) is “align to right” in the Japanese interface. Some names also differ from the usual video-editing terms. I list those in the term table near the end.

Start here: my YMM4 articles in English

• How to Install and Use YukkuriMovieMaker4 (YMM4): downloading, first launch, making a character speak, and setting up lip-syncing character art. It also covers which edition to choose and the license terms.
• YMM4 Export Settings: Why the File Is Huge and Which Bitrate to Use: the export window explained, with file sizes and quality measured for each setting.
• Preview stutter and variable-frame-rate (VFR) audio drift, retested (Japanese only for now): on the current version, video items no longer freeze the preview, and editing VFR footage as is produced no drift in the exported video.

Those two English articles were written with the Japanese interface: they show each Japanese label followed by English in parentheses. The steps are the same in the English interface; use the tables below to match the names.

Reading the official documentation: the official FAQ is a set of short Japanese pages, and your browser’s page translation handles the text well. The screenshots in it show the Japanese interface, which is where the “In Japanese” column of the tables below helps.

The main window

The menus

These are the menu items you are most likely to need. The letters in parentheses on screen, such as File(F), are access keys.

File

Edit

Below Undo and redo, the Edit menu has four submenus: Preview, Item, Voice operation, and Timeline. The most useful entries and their shortcut keys:

A key frame is called 中間点 (literally “midpoint”) in Japanese: a point inside an item where an animated value changes. See the official docs page on animation (Japanese). If Space does not start playback, the official docs have a fix (Japanese).

Layout, Tools, and Help

The 13 item types

Everything on the timeline is an item. You add items from the toolbar above the timeline or from File → Add item. They appear in this order:

The item panel

When you select an item, the item panel on the right shows its settings in collapsible sections. The first sections are the same for most item types.

General and Drawing

Sections for each item type

Character settings

Open it from File → Edit character, or with the button next to the character drop-down below the timeline. Each character has sections for General, Voice, Echo, Custom voice, Audio effects, Subtitle, and Standing picture.

Settings

Open it from File → Settings. The list on the left has ten pages followed by groups. In English the groups are sorted alphabetically, so their order differs from the Japanese interface.

The AquesTalk page has a Licenses section (ライセンス) that shows which AquesTalk libraries are installed. That matters for commercial use; see the license note in my install guide.

Effects at a glance

YMM4 v4.57.0.1 lists 187 video effects and 41 audio effects. The video effects are sorted into these categories:

I saw the first two category names, Animation and Appearance and Exit, in the English interface. The other category names and the example names are taken from YMM4’s own English language files, so the capitalization on screen may differ slightly.

Audio effects come in three groups in the Japanese interface: エフェクト (Effects, 30) such as Echo (エコー), Compressor (コンプレッサー), Limiter (リミッター), and Noise reduction (ノイズ除去); フィルター (Filter, 8) such as Equalizer (イコライザー) and Low Pass filter (ローパスフィルタ); and 基本 (Basic, 3): Pan (パン), Volume (音量), and Volume (dB). If an effect seems to do nothing, see this official docs page (Japanese).

The official documentation, section by section

Here are the pages of the FAQ on the developer’s site that I expect English-speaking users to need most, by section. All links go to Japanese pages.

English labels that differ from the usual terms, and Japanese words worth knowing

Some labels in YMM4’s English interface are literal translations. If you follow a general video-editing tutorial, or a Japanese YMM4 tutorial through machine translation, this table helps you match the words.

Licenses matter more than usual with YMM4, because the bundled Yukkuri voice (AquesTalk) and most character art have their own terms, especially for monetized videos. I summarize the terms I checked, with links to the originals, in the install guide. Always read the original terms yourself.

Summary

• YMM4 has an English interface: open the first menu, choose the entry with the gear icon, set the fourth row of the first page to English, and restart
• Almost everything is translated. Character and voice names, a few tool names, and the official documentation stay in Japanese
• For getting started, see the install guide; for exporting, see the export settings article
• The English labels here are the ones YMM4 v4.57.0.1 shows. I will add to this page as I test more features, starting with the ones the official documentation does not explain

I used Claude (an AI) to help research and organize the information on this page.