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AlOlaf Danish TAC 2015

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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5141 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 65 of 163
21 November 2013 at 11:03pm | IP Logged 
Gee, it's been three weeks since I've posted here, but it's not because I haven't been busy with Danish. A while back I ordered the first season of Forbrydelsen ("The Killing") on DVD with English subtitles and my girlfriend and I just loved it. I started thinking it would be great if I could get a version of the series with Danish subtitles, too, because I remembered how much target language subtitles helped me with German.

Several years ago I was searching for ways to increase my German vocabulary. I was taking words out of grammar workbooks and thematic vocabulary lists and putting them into Anki, but it was tedious and the words weren't sticking because I wasn't able to associate them with anything specific.

I felt like I was getting nowhere. I had a few German movies on DVD with English subtitles, but I couldn't pick out the German words in rapidly spoken passages. I'd watch the same segment over and over again in a futile attempt to understand a single phrase. I was getting seriously discouraged until I read where someone here on the forum recommended getting the original version of movies in one's target language because they often have subtitles for the hearing impaired. I managed to find a couple of excellent German documentaries with German subtitles and set to work looking up the words I didn't know.

Only it didn't seem like work. It was fun. While I was watching, I made a list of unknown words, which I later looked up and added to Anki. I discovered that it was easy to remember the words from their context in the films. I'm a very visual person and the words conjured up pictures along with audio associations, which I found to be immeasurably helpful in recalling the words' meaning.

Since this worked with German, I decided to try the same thing with Danish. There's no shortage of high-quality Danish cinema, but I didn't know if I'd be able to be able to get my hands on the original versions with Danish subtitles. After numerous Internet searches, I finally found a source.

And went nuts. Now I've got all three seasons of Forbrydelsen with Danish subtitles, along with Borgen I and II, Matador and half a dozen Danish movies. I got the British versions with English subtitles also, so my girlfriend, who speaks only English, can watch, too.

Having both versions means I can have both going at the same time on different players and compare the Danish subtitles with the English ones. I already had a little portable all-region DVD player, but I bought another one just like it for this project. So far I've gone through the first three episodes of Matador and looked up all the Danish words I don't know, which filled up a surprisingly large number of pages in my notebook. Now I'm in the process of entering all of these Danish words and their German definitions into Anki. I bought Anki's iPhone app last year, so i figure it's about time I started using it.

Just for good measure, I got the first three seasons of Dag on DVD with Norwegian subtitles. I've got a really good Norwegian-German dictionary from my brief foray into Norwegian from two years ago, so I decided what the hell. I saw a couple of clips from this show on YouTube (with English subtitles) and laughed my head off.

No more German Harry Potter CDs in the car for me. Now I drive around listening to the native audio from my self-learn Danish courses. It's beginning to sound less foreign.


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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6696 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 66 of 163
22 November 2013 at 3:19pm | IP Logged 
Your post above made me wonder whether there are subtitles on the Danish programs on homepages belonging to Danish TV stations, and then I stumbled over this announcement from Danmarks Radio:

Mange af tv-programmerne på dr.dk/nu får fremover valgfrie undertekster, hvilket især skal komme hørehæmmede til gode (...) Foreløbig er dog kun de forproducerede programmer, man kan få undertekster på på dr.dk/nu. Det vil sige, at man ikke kan se live-programmer som TV-Avisen og 'Aftenshowet' med tekstning. Den del arbejder DR stadig på.

I can't garantee that the programs on this homepage are accessible from outside Denmark, but if they are you might find them useful to boost your Danish.


Edited by Iversen on 23 November 2013 at 5:37am

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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5141 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 67 of 163
22 November 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for the info, Iversen. I've found some very interesting programming on dr.dk (documentaries, news, Matador), but so far nothing with Danish subtitles. That surprised me because I can get all kinds of programming with Swedish subtitles on svtplay.se and nrk.no even has Norwegian subtitles for game shows(!).

It sounds like I'm not the only one who wants Danish subtitles, though. If I understood the story correctly, they're going to start including them, at least in some programming. Hopefully it'll be something they'll let me watch in the US.
1 person has voted this message useful



SchwarzerWolf
Newbie
Italy
Joined 4516 days ago

20 posts - 27 votes
Speaks: Italian*
Studies: English, German

 
 Message 68 of 163
01 December 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged 
AlOlaf wrote:
Only it didn't seem like work. It was fun. While I was watching, I made a list of unknown words, which I later looked up and added to Anki. I discovered that it was easy to remember the words from their context in the films. I'm a very visual person and the words conjured up pictures along with audio associations, which I found to be immeasurably helpful in recalling the words' meaning.

I've been trying this "method" for a while with English and...I agree, that's probably one of the best ways we have to improve the knowledge of a language.
I guess that's beacause - unlike a simple language course - both your hearing and eyesight are stimulated at the same time and usually you watch movies and TV-series you like the most, so it's entertaining as well. I only see two cons:
- you should have at least an intermediate knowledge of that language, comparable to B1 level or more, which is really hard to get for languages like Danish, since there are no comprehensive courses as far as I know.
Otherwise you could get quickly frustrated and overwehlmed by the amount of unkown words and idioms/slang, not to mention that while at a beginner level words at normal speed in any language sound "blurred"
- you should make sure the subtitles rare complete, well, sometimes they're not.
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Fasulye
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2012
Moderator
Germany
fasulyespolyglotblog
Joined 5840 days ago

5460 posts - 6006 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto
Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 69 of 163
02 December 2013 at 12:59pm | IP Logged 
AlOlaf wrote:
Just for good measure, I got the first three seasons of Dag on DVD with Norwegian subtitles. I've got a really good Norwegian-German dictionary from my brief foray into Norwegian from two years ago, so I decided what the hell. I saw a couple of clips from this show on YouTube (with English subtitles) and laughed my head off.


Which Norwegian-German dictionary have you got? I had negative experiences with the Langenscheidt Dänisch-Deutsch / Deutsch-Dänisch dictionary because it is printed in so small letters that I almost cannot read it. What about the letter size of your dictionary?

Fasulye

Edited by Fasulye on 02 December 2013 at 1:00pm

1 person has voted this message useful



AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5141 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 70 of 163
02 December 2013 at 8:32pm | IP Logged 
I got my German-Norwegian dictionary two years ago here.

It's a big, hefty, high-quality hardcover edition and the type is bigger and bolder than Langenscheidt's Dänisch-Deutsch offering. I like that it gives the gender of the Scandinavian language nouns, something my Gyldendal Danish-German dictionary leaves out. The downside is the price. It was expensive when I bought it and now it costs even more, the equivalent of € 65.50 plus shipping! I searched online for a used one, but got no hits.

Edited by AlOlaf on 02 December 2013 at 8:47pm

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montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4821 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 71 of 163
02 December 2013 at 9:14pm | IP Logged 
Interesting about the subtitles. I watched "Borgen" series 3 on dr tv via the internet,
and subtitles would have helped (although there was quite a lot of English). I'm now
watching it on BBC4 with English subtitles, and finding out about a lot of the
subtleties
that I missed first time around. :-)

There was also an interesting documentary series going out at about the same time
called
"Bagefter Borgen", about the real Danish parliament and government. Subtitles would
have
helped there as well, although even without, it was very interesting to watch.


EDIT: Sorry, it's "Bag borgen" - still available! (no subtitles though, as far as I can
see).

Sadly, I notice, the "Broen II" series has just expired. :-((

Edited by montmorency on 05 December 2013 at 3:12pm

1 person has voted this message useful



montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4821 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 72 of 163
02 December 2013 at 11:00pm | IP Logged 
AlOlaf wrote:


In case anybody’s interested, this is how I make my recordings: First, I import the
course CDs into iTunes and save the tracks as mp3 files. These I put into a free
program called Audacity, which I use to cut up the dialogue into manageable,
repeatable chunks. Next, I pronounce each of these segments to determine how long the
response pause needs to be and then add the corresponding amount of silence. Finally, I
duplicate the result so that every sentence or phrase, together with its ensuing pause,
occurs twice in succession. I do this for every chunk of dialogue. Once I've finished a
recording and saved it as an Audacity file, I import it back into iTunes as a wav file
and there convert it to an mp3.




Hi AlOlaf,

Do you know that (if you wish) you can export directly from Audacity to MP3 format?
You need to have installed LAME separately, but the current installation instructions
for Audacity make that quite easy.

Thus you could skip the WAV/iTunes step, unless that has some particular advantage for
you.


I'm interested to hear you are using Dänisch ohne Mühe, as I have a copy of that on my
shelves, sitting there making me feel guilty. I call this my "Pre-Passive Wave". :-)
(I did work quite hard though with TYS and other things a while back, but Danish has
taken a back seat lately).


You don't seem short of material, but if you have the patience for audiobooks, you
might possibly be interested in the "Department Q" series of books by Jussi Adler
Olsen, which are available in English and German, as well as Danish. There are
audiobooks in German, which are unfortunately abridged, but the Danish audiobooks seem
complete and unabridged.

One of my projects for the future is to try to make parallel text versions of at least
some of these, perhaps in English-German first, then in English-Danish. (For
"completeness", I'd really have to do Danish-German, but I'm not sure if I have the
stamina! :-) ). It's quite time-consuming, but as I have mentioned elsewhere on HTLAL,
it can be quite instructive.



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