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Learning a language by watching TV? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Music, Movies, TV & Radio |  | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6856 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 121 of 134 15 October 2009 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
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There is a difference between "learning" a language and "living" it. To me, learning is when you do grammar drills and exercise books and audio courses. "Living" is when you try and put this learning into practise e.g. buying stuff in shops and listening to the radio.
So no, I don't think you can learn it by watching TV, but by watching TV, you can test how your learning has gone. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5977 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 122 of 134 15 October 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
If i turn on L1 subtitles, then i find that within a few minutes i'm almost completely ignoring the L2 audio. Maybe some other people are different, but it takes me a LOT of effort to learn anything when i have L1 subtitles on. As further proof of this, i bet i've watched many hundreds of hours of japanese anime with English subs, but i've probably only learned a handful of japanese words that way. In my current German project, i watch lots of TV with no subtitles (or sometimes with German subtitles if i get stuck) and i find that i really get into it a lot better and understand way more of the actual German. Therefore, i would recommend either no subtitles or L2 subtitles. Also, remember that it will take many hours of listening before it sinks in properly. Watching TV in another language will seem really difficult at the start, but be patient. It really starts to sink in as you spend more hours doing it, especially if you can watch several hours in the same day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ggg Newbie United States Joined 5515 days ago 8 posts - 18 votes | Message 123 of 134 15 October 2009 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Watching TV can help a lot with learning common vocabulary, but the sort of TV you need to watch is not the news reports, cultural documentaries, or films, but the sort of mindless pap that gets shown on weekday mornings. Housewives' TV it used to be called. The sort of stuff where a celebrity chef comes in and cooks, holding up evrything to the camera and saying its name before putting it in the pan. Regular fashion shows where they talk about fashion, styles, colours etc with actual examples of the clothes. An introduction to the tabloid celebrities of whichever country you are in; you may not want to directly gossip about them, but you will come across lots of indirect references wherever you go.
You might prefer to be watching something else, but like all learning this pays off in the long term. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Alvinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 6225 days ago 828 posts - 832 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish | Message 124 of 134 16 October 2009 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I hope to buy my DVD player soon as I don't have cable TV where I am now....that might be the best deal to increase my vocabulary....my learning needs are completely out of control....all right, I'm used to checking out movies at the cinema but I don't find it enough whatsoever....obviously, watching the movies with subs in English or Spanish.....no more bad channels with their terrible shows!!! Edited by Alvinho on 16 October 2009 at 9:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JanKG Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5758 days ago 245 posts - 280 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Finnish | Message 125 of 134 17 October 2009 at 9:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Can somone summarize the information from this topic? Right now it is too much to read. Someone should have split off the thread on the usefulness of tv from the technical ones (which mp3/... is best for language learning), or that is what I think. Can it still be done by a moderator ?
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 126 of 134 17 October 2009 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm with you on that. 5 years ago I started learning languages properly (I'd done French and Italian at school, but high school language classes in Scotland aren't great) and I got myself a DVD player so I could improve my listening skills. I found that once the subtitles were there, I just didn't listen -- reading seemed to be occupying the language centre of my brain. Watching Gaelic TV (all broadcast with burnt-in English subtitles), I was doing the same thing and there wasn't much I could do about it. An old guy I know, a native Gael, says that he often finds himself reading the subtitles rather than listening to the voices. If a native speaker falls into that trap, what chance does a learner have? Like yourself, I can hear when I make an effort, and through practice it has got a bit easier. Currently I'm watching the Swedish detective series Wallander (it's on BBC4) and I sometimes notice the odd word that sounds like a Scots word. But that's 5 years of practice for very little return. I'm sure I could train myself to do it better if I tried, but I'm in two minds about that, because right now I really enjoy world cinema, and I don't want it to become a chore.... But even then, simply switching off the subtitles when I know that they're there makes it seem like extra effort too. I find I'm only able to get a lot out of TV when there are no English subtitles available at all, so I find internet TV to be something of a Godsend.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 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 127 of 134 17 October 2009 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have today watched a program in Finnish at TV1 (Swedish TV), i.e. with Swedish subtitles whenever a Finn spoke and in Finnish whenever a (Finland)Swedish spoke, i.e. a member of the Swedish speaking minority in Suomi. I don't speak Finnish (yet), but I have recently read the Kauderwälsch guide to Finnish. So I didn't try to understand what the Finns said, but I set myself a much more limited goal: trying to catch some words here and there and determining whether the words in Finnish seemed to follow in roughly the same order as those in the Swedish subtitles. And it was not totally impossible to do this: for instance there was a passage about "the next trends", and almost at the same time I heard something like "kommia hottia" (as usual with stress on the first syllable and long double consonants). I could also recognize some numbers and placenames and the word "ruotsi" (Sweden or Swedish).
OK, would I be able to learn Finnish by listening to TV programs? My guess is that it would take forever, and I would end up speaking Finnish like a Spanish donkey. But as a preparation for learning to understand spoken Finnish it would function very well (mycket brå!), and you could probably also pick up some of the language melody and individual sounds with your right brain hemisphere while trying to find recognizable words with the left one. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2009 at 3:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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