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Spanish DVDs | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Music, Movies, TV & Radio |  | |
| medchess Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6178 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 1 of 7 29 January 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
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As part of my Spanish learning I decided to start watching movies in Spanish. What I will do is play a short segment and try to understand what is said, and then play it again or a few times until I can understand it, without using subtitles (or using subtitles as a last resort), and then once I've mastered a scene go onto the next scene, and so forth.
Does anyone know how I can find a list of Spanish DVDs? I've seen a lot of movies that have subtitles but I think that's just the text and not the audio. What I would really like is to find a list of really good movies that have Spanish available as one of the languages. I've been searching IMDB based on rating but I've found no easy way to find out if Spanish is one of the languages except by searching on amazon.com which is a bit time-consuming because I have looked up at least 10 movies so far and not found 1 with Spanish although a few of them have subtitles. Some of the movies are also before DVDs were available so I've had to restrict the search some more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 7 29 January 2011 at 8:09pm | IP Logged |
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If you go for films originally filmed in Spanish, you should always get the original Spanish soundtrack.
It's also better from the point of view of language -- dubbed films suffer because the script isn't always natural language, having been jiggered about with to fit the lip movements roughly. This can best be seen in cheap dubbed kung fu movies. It seems like a quarter of all lines start "Hey..." and they all have random pauses in them. So it ends up "hey... tell your boss... that I'm going to kill him" etc. There are fundamental differences in the rhythms of English and Spanish that mean a Spanish-dubbed Holywood film will be a bad model to follow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 7 29 January 2011 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
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I agree with Cainntear. You should go for native materials whenever possible. Part of the reason you are learning another language is to get into another culture. If you watch Hollywood films with a Spanish soundtrack/subtitles you're missing out on the culture of your target language. The Spanish speaking world has great films and wonderful directors such as Cuarón and Almodóvar to name just two. Why watch "Die Even Harder 15" in dubbed Spanish when you can watch Penelope Cruz in "Volver" in the original Spanish.
My advice is to get a netflix account and have a look at their extensive Spanish language collection- best deal in the US. I use them myself. Search this forum for good Spanish speaking film recommendations. The threads are here. You should also start websurfing in Spanish. Search for "mejores películas en español" in google, for example. Barring that, there's e-bay and the local video store often has used films for sale. Edited by iguanamon on 29 January 2011 at 9:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6348 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 7 30 January 2011 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
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If you're going to ignore all of the above advice about not using English films dubbed in Spanish . . .
This book is incredibly good for under 12 bucks on Amazon: Listen 'n' Learn Spanish with Your Favorite Movies It has extensive vocabulary notes based on scene-by-scene sequencing of the following 16 (kid-oriented, but generally) very good movies: Eight Below, The Fox and the Hound, March of the Penguins, The Princess Bride, The Absent-Minded Professor (Flubber!), Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Tarzan, Holes, Home Alone, Hoosiers, Rocky III, Anne of Green Gables, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Mary Poppins. Take advantage of Amazon's "Search inside this book" link at hte top left of that page (under the the book pic). If you put one of the movie titles in the "search" under the "Surprise me!" link, you can see a lot of the pages for that movie.) I started on "Princess Bride," which they list under "Beginner," and I still had some trouble understanding a lot of the sound track, since I have the annoying preference to understand every single line uttered in a scene before moving on. So I wish they had the whole @#$% transcript included instead of "only" tons of vocab, but it is a great book. Edit: No, it does not include DVDs of the movies, for which one reviewer gave it 2 stars for that omission. ;-) Edited by TerryW on 30 January 2011 at 5:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5217 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 7 30 January 2011 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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Sorry to say this, but good Spanish movies available on DVD are rare.
Your prospectives on this are bad, because: -If you go for dubbed movies, I'd say there are around a 25% of bad dubbing jobs out there, where speech doesn't sound natural, etc. Oh yes, on top of I'd say 50%+ of dire bad translations (but that's not the point). And if that's important to you, lip sync is always a problem. -If you go for original Spanish materials, you'll have to wade through a 75%+ of severely bad movies (there's this extremely widespread pretentiousness and attempts not to make genre movies simply because that's oh so... genre) which may be VERY discouraging. So I'd say go for anything which is dubbed and has some thumbs up (ask me or other people), or for original material that is at least 15 years old (may be hard to find). And of course, there's always documentaries, news... cartoons? Edit: of the ones TerryW said, The Princess Bride, Mary Poppins and The Incredibles are very good. Edited by mrwarper on 30 January 2011 at 10:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| medchess Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6178 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 6 of 7 02 February 2011 at 1:53am | IP Logged |
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So they don't translate the actual text literally (I don't mean literally, but such that it would be correct in the language it's going to) but they try to edit it so it fits the lip movements?
Although I would be missing out culturally, it would seem to still be good practice to use dubbed movies depending on what I can find. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5217 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 7 02 February 2011 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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Well, maybe I exaggerated a bit. The older the dubbing the better, though. Nowadays it's all too common to hear the dubbers and not to be able to think 'this was right before the lunch break' or something. So soulless, or disconnected from the show vibe. But almost always natural, anyway.
About the quality of translations... good in general, but completely nonsensical bits or blundering mistakes happen, especially in technical fields. I'm not sure if this has always been the same, because I've become oversensitive about that lately, and I still have to review many classics. Odds are they were like that all along. Dubbing metric and lip-sync: If you translate as closely as possible, many texts won't fit so they're edited a bit. The alternative would be to have perfect translations and the guy on screen speaking with his mouth closed, etc. Some people like my Russian friends prefer this. I personally find it disturbing, but that's a Russian thing I guess. They do a really good job most of the time, so don't worry. Now back in the days of yore (Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy come to mind) scenes were shot several times with the actors mouthing the sounds in different languages so the dubbing after that would be simply perfect (and it was -- I remember those gentlemen had accents in the dubbing, though, but it was just for laughs; anyway, I digress). No matter how you spin it, it can't be better nowadays, but fortunately it is good enough 95% of the time. Anyway, I don't think you'll be 'missing out' a lot culturally. We're not Martians, you know :) Spaniards are culturally closer to other Europeans or USAns than they are to people from Latin America, even if it's the same language. Given that, perhaps it's a good idea if you precise a bit if you intend to use your Spanish in Europe or America, or... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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