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Watching TV for language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4486 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes  Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 28 03 October 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been living in China for more than year and my Mandarin is still pretty basic. I still spend most of my
time at work where everyone speaks English mostly and with my wife at home who isn't as keen as l am when it comes to language learning. Most of the sustained interaction I get with locals is when I teach a grappling class every Saturday, but even then I have someone to help me out with the translation. I am of course trying to use Mandarin more and more in my daily life. One thing I thought of to help my comprehension is adding thirty minutes to an hour of watching TV a day to my routine (I usually don't watch TV at all.) How effective is watching TV in your target language for language learning? Am I better off listening to podcasts, working on my flash cards or other study methods? What are the tips you can give me or learning techniques you can share with me to make the most of time I spend watching TV? Edited by Duke100782 on 03 October 2013 at 3:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4701 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 2 of 28 03 October 2013 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Watching TV with native-language subtitles brought my Dutch from a shaky B1 to a solid B2. I would say the
subtitles were key for me, as I don't personally benefit much from listening to input too fast to understand. If you can watch TV online, that can be nice because you can stop the program at times to note down a word to look up later. However, stopping the program really frequently (>every 5 minutes or so) is too disruptive. Just concentrating on matching what you hear to what you read will probably be work enough at first. Eventually you should try taking the subtitles away. But I wouldn't worry about doing that until you have already reached a reasonable level of listening comprehension (>50%). Last thought - it's all about finding programs you like. Watch what you would watch in your native languages anyway. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 28 03 October 2013 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Watching TV is one of those things that is very effective if you have subtitles (when
you're B1 or so and need the subs to follow everything), and it's very good for vocab- bolstering when you're B2 or so and can fill in the gaps from context, but I've never used it from the start, only if I already had some sort of base. It also doesn't help that I don't generally watch TV. But as they say: do, or do not. There is no try. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 28 03 October 2013 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Since I use TV a lot, I'll offer you some of my experiences. As always, your mileage may vary. TV works especially well for two things: 1) If you can read fairly quickly, and your vocabulary is decent, but you're having trouble decoding high-speed native speech, then TV can vastly improve your decoding. 2) TV can function as extensive input. Like most extensive input, it works by taking vocabulary that you can just barely decode, and gradually turning it into fully internalized vocabulary. This, in turn, will make it possible to decode more new vocabulary, which you can then internalize. Note that this only works if your "decoder" is fully engaged—you have to give the TV your full attention. For TV to work, I'd guess it needs to be at least 40% comprehensible. And you're going to need to watch a fair bit of TV: think in terms of entire 15–20 hour seasons of a show, and at least 15 hours of TV per month, preferably more. Finding partially comprehensible TV can be tricky, particularly early on. Some suggestions: Strong A2: Look for nature, science or other documentaries on familiar subjects. These tend to have incredibly slow and clear narration. Some news shows might work, too, if you like that sort of thing. Strong B1: Look for a dubbed TV series with clear dialog (and ideally accurate, bilingual subs). At this level, it really helps to watch several seasons of a series, because you'll get used to each character's voice, and learn all the specialized vocabulary. Don't hesitate to watch several episodes with a transcript, or to watch certain episodes twice. B2: Branch out into other easy dubbed series, and start adding harder series, children's cartoons, group news discussions, and individual episodes on random stuff. You should eventually reach the point where you can turn on the TV, hit "Change channel" no more than twice, and find something you can watch with pleasure and reasonable comprehension. My general rule of thumb is that it's OK to rewind twice to catch something interesting, or ask my wife to repeat something a few times per episode. But most of my time is spent just watching, paying close attention, and trying my hardest to understand the dialog. The real advantage of TV is that you can profit from it when you're too tired to actually study. I can only write, review grammar or do Anki for so many minutes a day. But even once I've used up my quality study time, I can always watch TV. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4637 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 5 of 28 03 October 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I sometimes watch TV in Russian. My passive skills are probably a solid A2, wandering towards B1, and although sometimes I don't understand enough to even know what they are talking about, I still find it useful in the sense that I get more exposure to the sounds of the language and I get to hear different voices, women, men, old, young, children. Compared to radio, you can actually infer more even if you don't understand everything, after all non-verbal communication is very important, and seing the body language and the non-verbal context can give you clues. But I'd say watching TV at an early stage should just be a small supplement. If you really want to improve you need to study intensively and communicate and use the language actively as much as possible.
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| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4634 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 6 of 28 03 October 2013 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think TV is only useful if you have read a fair amount. Reading will get you a lot of vocab, and even more passive vocab.
TV worked great for me. When I first started watching a comedy show that used slang, incorrect grammar, and a lot of references, I don't think I understand anything for the first 5 hours. Maybe a few words per sentence, then whole sentences that I understood nothing. By the time I got to the 20th hour of the show, my comprehension went up. I started picking out words easier and I didn't have to concentrate as hard to understand. Just accept the fact before going into it that the first 20-30 hours will probably be blank. Also, you will think you hear words that aren't really there at times, that you won't be able to pick out every single word, and you won't understand every joke or reference. And this is just a given because unless you're immersed in the country for awhile, you will probably never get everything. Just keep watching. Edited by sillygoose1 on 03 October 2013 at 5:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4202 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 28 03 October 2013 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Watching tv in REALLY helped my Korean a lot. There's a ton of disagreement on whether
or not you should watching foreign language with tv with English subs, no sub, foreign language subs, ect. I say just go for it and use what you want, though. In the beginning I used English subs. I don't think it hinders learning all that much. But after I could at least follow the plot without the subs, I switched to no subs/Korean subs, which I think really helped my comprehension tons. It forces you to pay a lot closer attention. I don't think watching without subs if you're at the lower levels helps a lot, because you have no words to put everything in context. It'll sound just like babbling. But yeah, tv can teach you a lot. I've learned tons of words from Korean dramas simply because I heard them all the time. And it made my spoke Korean sound much more natural. And the fact that you have visual context sort of makes it a bit better than using podcasts. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5343 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 8 of 28 03 October 2013 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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TV is very effective and a great resource as it enables you to experience the language in a living setting. It can be used both for consolidating what you are learning in your main study textbook at earlier stages and by itself at advanced levels.
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