tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4588 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian
| Message 1 of 2 21 May 2012 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
I was thinking in particular of watching out for phrases and sentiments that are particularly common in English, so I could see how they are expressed in French. It seems like one might be able to accumulate a whole lot of these just by carefully watching a few hours of sitcoms and taking notes. Of course, I would keep in mind the caveats that the translation may not capture the exact meaning, the social situations in which a phrase is used may not be exactly the same, and so on.
Have any of you tried something like this? Did you find it helpful?
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EddieH Newbie Andorra Joined 4652 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Catalan, French
| Message 2 of 2 21 May 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
I think (as you know) that it's definitely not the best/ideal way of practicing the target language. However, as long as you are able to not just block out the subtitles, and you take the translations with a grain of salt (as you said), I don't see why it wouldn't be at least a bit helpful.
I did something like this when I lived in Costa Rica. I loved the show ER and a lot of shows there have subtitles (as opposed to being dubbed). I watched ER with a notebook next to me and wrote down all of the words in the subtitles I wasn't familiar with. This was before internet was widespread there, so I didn't have any way of checking, but since I was pretty good on the language overall it wasn't difficult to figure out what the unknown word meant. I learned a ton of medical words that way!
On the other hand, that's a show with a lot of dramatic silences and people don't necessarily speak that quickly, so I was able to both listen to the English and read the subtitles. Recently, I watched House in English with Spanish subtitles, and the dialog was so quick that I found myself having to just concentrate on one or the other.
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