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DVD listening technique | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6800 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 1 of 12 14 August 2011 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lots of people here watch DVDs. But lets not kid ourselves, watching a DVD is only useful for learning if we can mine what we heard for future study. My technique is as follows.
You will need * DVD with another language option * Notebook/Microsoft word open, or a paper notebook Objective 1) To identify idioms and other interesting phrases in the target language 2) To establish where gaps in your listening skills lay Justification DVDs can be a good source of learning languages. It is ‘live’, real life language, not the artificial stuff in language courses. However, without making a note of what you had difficulty with and/or what you usefully obtained, it isn't much use. Technique Start the DVD and watch the episode as normal. Have the notebook open. When you reach a point in the episode where a character says something that relates to the two objectives • Pause the DVD and make a note of the time stamp • Write down what the character said, or in the case of something you don’t get, what you think he said. Rewind the DVD a few seconds back if you need to hear it again. You might even want to right click and change the language to English to hear what they said to make sure. This should take less than 30 seconds each time you do this. You might do this 5-15 times per episode, depending on your language level. At the end of the episode, you should have something that looks like this Roswell Season 1 Episode 4 7:46 tu n'etais qu'un enfant 8:52 tu le monde veux trouver une ame souer sur cette planette 10:56 c'est tres valorisant 11:32 pourrais tu m’expliqais porquoi tu essayer de cacher la verite 13:41 J’ai un mauvais pre sentiment At a later date, you can watch the episode again (you have a record of the show and episode number). Also, you can practise the sentences you mined in other areas e.g. trying to work them into conversations. This technique works for me so I thought I'd share it Edited by FuroraCeltica on 14 August 2011 at 10:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4952 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 2 of 12 14 August 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are many mistakes in your french.
Right now I am working with a tv serie in Spanish. I did watch this serie many times already in french and more so in English a few years ago. The first 2 episodes I got in Spanish on the internet - or so I thought. I was surprised I understood so little and so badly. At one point the caracter says the number eight - ocho in Spanish - huit in french and it did not sound like ocho but more like the french. I thought maybe it is specific to some South America Spanish. I figured out that this 2 episodes were not spoken in Spanish but in catalan. I now have 20 more episodes all in Spanish. First I watch them then I record the audio with audacity. Then I listen to the audio without watching the pictures. I aslo downloaded the Spanish subtitles. After a few listening I will listen when I read the subtitles. This reading will confirm what I understood and will help me with what I did not understand. I will probably work on the subtitlte with LWT. The very few subtitles I read so far - fit perfectly with the audio. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6800 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 12 15 August 2011 at 12:02am | IP Logged | |||||
I know, thats why I am working on correcting them :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4794 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 4 of 12 15 August 2011 at 12:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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There is a little problem with this technique if it comes to obscure languages. I've just wanted to find some Macedonian films with Macedonian subtitles and... nothing.
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| Neri Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4798 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 5 of 12 15 August 2011 at 1:57am | IP Logged | |||||
Good, but it might not be a good idea to base your study on transcripts with that many spelling errors in them. You could reduce the number by using a French-language spellchecker though - you can get them for free for OpenOffice and also Firefox and Chrome. It won't do anything for gender agreement or verb tense issues (parlais/parler/parlez/parlé etc) but basic spelling issues should go away. If you can get Word's French spellchecker, it's better and will often catch gender and pluralization issues, and I hear Antidote (which I gather you use with Word) is the best. Edited by Neri on 15 August 2011 at 1:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5255 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 6 of 12 15 August 2011 at 6:05am | IP Logged | |||||
BTW, there are many free web sites that offer movie and TV subtitle (SRT) text files for download and it's also relatively easy to extract subtitles from DVDs for which no ready-made subtitle files exist with SubRip. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tsyrak Diglot Newbie France How-to-Learn-EnglishRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4816 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Hungarian | Message 7 of 12 16 August 2011 at 2:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I learned spoken English by watching TV shows, sitcoms specifically (my vocabulary was already very rich when I got started). I started it after a phonetics class at uni and it quickly became a very addictive -- and effective -- habit.
I highly recommend using sitcoms rather than other genres for a number of reasons, the main ones being: - It's short (usually 20 min) and does not require too long an effort. - It's easy to stack up several episodes when you feel like it. - It's meant to be fun, meaning you will have a laugh EVEN when you do not understand everything. - It uses simple, every day, English. Short sentences and pun-lines make it easy on the listener and help him check his understanding. Basically, you will get used to hearing and, from there, using simple and common expressions. To get yourself started with this type of content, I recommend watching episodes you already know without any subtitles (you don't want to be reading, you want to open up your ears to the music :-)). Once you are used to the characters voices (accents, intonations, speech patterns...) you will be able to watch new episodes in your target language directly. I got used to spoken English after like 6 or 7 seasons of Friends. I hate anything too scholar, or that would spoil my fun, so my technique was just to get used to the actors voices and improve from there. When starting a new sitcom or show, later on, I would just watch it without subtitles (and without having watched it in my native language first) and would NOT understand everything nor even a lot then... For example: when I started watching Seinfeld to get used to the NY accents, I was having quite a hard time... However, I just KNEW I would get used to their accents... So I stuck to it and I indeed got used to the accent and could understand the show perfectly after something like two seasons (first few episodes were really hard but then it got easier). Once in a while, when I felt I was understanding 99% of the dialogs, I would check a transcript online to find out what the few words I missed were ('cause I was too curious!). Before that I would not, because I hate to feel like I'm working and I saw myself improving all of the time. Pausing just spoils my fun, though I could rewind a few seconds on the computer with the press of a key and would use it sometimes. You can of course use material other than sitcoms, or even films, but it just feels to me like the learning curve is slower. Hope it helps! Fab Edited by tsyrak on 16 August 2011 at 2:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 12 16 August 2011 at 11:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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My recommendation would be to pick material that you're likely to understand. What does that mean?
Well, for example I took a summer school in Santiago de Compostela and we did a project on the cathedral. As part of it, we got given an audio-guide (which I think is still on my MP3 player). For a few months afterwards, I would play it every now and then and imagine myself in the cathedral. This meant that I knew lots of terminology relating to church architecture, and later when flicking through the free videos on RTVE.es, I found a series about Spanish churches which I started watching. I had a solid grounding in Spanish grammar, and I knew most of the specialist vocabulary, so I was able to focus on understanding the accent and phraseology. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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