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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5345 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 57 of 59 24 June 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged |
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I watched the entire series of "Mahabharat" several times over as a boy and sadly never learnt a single word of Hindi. I can say the same of Japanese anime and French movies later on in life too, and it's not because I didn't want to learn some new exotic phrases, I can assure you. So I think the key issue here is focus, or at least in my case, the capacity to focus on language whilst glued to a flashing box of lights accompanied by a whirlwind of weird and wondrous background noises.
Any native input is great of course, and I'm all for it. But following subtitles is always going to be much easier than trying to guess what's going on from context and a few recognisable keywords. And when I begin focusing on the subs like a lexical bloodhound, I quickly find myself starting to tune out the foreign speech and take my eyes off a large proportion of the visual context too. In this respect I think our capacity to ignore and tune out certain aspects around us, be they mother-in-laws, nagging parents or otherwise unintelligible banter, is very often underestimated. I've watched hundreds of English-speaking films with English subtitles amongst foreign friends, and even I as a fluent native speaker, couldn't help keep my eyes off the infernal entourage of scrolling text below. So whilst it may indeed be possible for some exceptional people with super powers of concentration, the rest of us mere mortals will tend to always fall into this trap (or for a better word, this sensible route to swiftest comprehension). When I consider what my little muddle of grey matter is doing whilst watching a film or tv series, I quickly realise that reading subtitles whilst trying to follow the equivalent of Jason Bourne jump from building to building in the taciturn action sequences, or watching Monkey take on yet another hoard of insidious demons in the musical interludes, takes up nearly all of my focus and mental processing (with maybe 1-2% left for snacking motor skills of course), which leaves very little time for the far more complex process of listening to and understanding a foreign language. And the bizarre thing, now that I always switch off the subs whilst learning a language these days, is that I actually pick up words quite quickly given practice, and get a real buzz when I actually hear and recognise a new word I learnt that day or during the previous weeks. When I started watching "El Internado" in Spanish last month, for example, I didn't understand a single word apart from "¡Hola!", and felt quite bewildered. Now I'm able to follow the episodes quite comfortably, and this in turn has also improved my listening ability in real-life conversations with my tutor. Edited by Teango on 24 June 2010 at 10:06am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5197 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 58 of 59 24 June 2010 at 11:59am | IP Logged |
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That's a good observation Teango.
I watch lots of American movies with my Japanese GF, and she likes to have the English subtitles on. Quite often those subtitles just plain annoy the hell out of me because I have to concentrate just to ignore them. Even as someone who is 100% native in the language of the film, those stupid things still suck me down to some degree and I still end up reading them a little bit. Subtitle text is like a little vortex of doom, always sucking people into it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5787 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 59 of 59 26 June 2010 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
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Maybe I'm a super oddball and didn't know it, but given the forum we are on I thought
more people would be like me :) I'm ALWAYS far more enraptured by the words and language being used than the actual story. I'll gladly pause a movie every 10 seconds to look up words that I don't know (I've been known to take 6 hours to watch a 1.5 hour movie). So no idea how everyone is able to read the English subtitles and then ignore the foreign language, cause the center of my focus is the language. I usually read the English subs, and then think in my head "Okay, what is the equivalent of each of those words in target language? Did I hear the sounds of all the words that I imagine they must have said in the foreign language to express that? No, an exception? Okay rewind 10 seconds, let's see what this exception is -- maybe it is a more accurate way of expressing the term than the word I thought it would be translated into... Hrm... " and I work it like a reverse engineering puzzle. It's hard for me to NOT do this, and to just force myself to sit through a movie without pausing -- exceedingly hard. I can't watch movies with other people cause overcoming the urge to pause over and over is excruciating! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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