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Anki & Subtitles | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| civi999 Newbie United States Joined 5194 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Studies: English* | Message 1 of 11 10 July 2010 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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An idea occurred to me the other day. I don't know if something like this has been posted before, but I thought I'd share anyway.
It goes something like this: STEP 1: Download subtitle text files for any movie of interest in the desired language. They can be easily and freely found on many websites. For example: Movie Subtitles. STEP 2: Open the text file and paste it into your favorite spreadsheet application. I use MS. At this stage clean up the counter numbers and find/replace the pipe ("|") symbols. I also use ASAP Utilities. It is a free MS excel addon that makes text manipulation very simple. It can be found here: ASAP Utilities. STEP 3: When you have the phrases and sentences cleaned up in the way you want, copy and paste them into your favorite online translation program. I use Google Translate. Google Translate STEP 4: Copy and paste the results into the next column within your spreadsheet and save the file in the appropriate import format for your favorite flash card program. For example: Anki. In this manner, you get to see and practice vocabulary related to spoken language. You also get to see it in grammatical context. Let me know if anyone thinks there are additional ways to improve upon this approach? For example, focusing upon certain movie genres for targeting specific pools of vocabulary. Have fun folks! Love this site! Hope someone finds my idea useful. :) Edited by civi999 on 10 July 2010 at 8:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5586 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 2 of 11 10 July 2010 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Subtitles are a pretty literal translation of the OV and often there are subtitles in the original language at those websites. Using both files would be better than Google Translate.
Also, for TV shows, fan communities post episode transcripts on their websites. I've seen them for LOST, House, CSI and other shows. I envy people who use TV shows to learn English because there's so much entertaining audio + transcript material on the web. However... if you download foreign subtitles for an American TV show, they might not be the "official" ones. They might be the subtitles added to pirate files of the videos distributed peer-to-peer, and translation quality might not be very good. What I've done for TV shows is read the transcript of a scene, and then watch the scene. Simple. If I can only find a transcript in English it's still quite useful. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5662 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 3 of 11 10 July 2010 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I have tried sub-titles as parallel text, not within Anki. So the story was still intact. But I found movie sub-titles as text, without the movie, to be extremely boring, even for movies I really like. Maybe in Anki, where following the plot is not a consideration, they would work better. I agree with your observation that sub-titles are a very good source of conversational speech, so maybe I'll try putting some of them into Anki. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| civi999 Newbie United States Joined 5194 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Studies: English* | Message 4 of 11 10 July 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | ||
The point really was to have a pool of conversational phrases in a native language. The actual plot or story line is unimportant-- except the genre consideration I noted above. So rather than studying just vocabulary lists, one can learn conversational phrase lists. Edited by civi999 on 10 July 2010 at 9:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5586 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 5 of 11 10 July 2010 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I also wanted to use sentences for study, and I use sentences in the Practice Makes Perfect series of workbooks. There are five of these books for French. I cover the French sentences with my hand and translate from the English. The benefit of using textbook or workbook sentences is you get to practice all the verb tenses and other points of grammar, and you have a reliable translation right there. Very convenient. These books have conversational phrases and there are also books that focus on colloquial vocab and grammar. It just seems like a more efficient learning tool, to me.
My experience with Google Translate is that it is not good with idioms. I just look them up at WordReference. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5407 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 6 of 11 10 July 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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You may be interested in subs2srs:
subs2srs is a small utility that allows you to create Anki import files based on your favorite foreign language movies and TV shows to aid in the language learning process. This utility will parse through subtitle files, extract the dialog and timing information, and then use that information to generate audio clips, snapshots, and video clips for each line of dialog. Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/subs2srs/files/?sort=filenam e&sortdir=asc Instructions: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=2643 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5777 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 7 of 11 11 July 2010 at 12:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I have a complete TV series 'SRSd' too. I first got the idea from the Antimoon website,
so it's not like we are inventing anything :) I managed to split the episodes in little clips along with the corresponding subtitles in separate text files, in order to practise listening, and then I extracted loads of sentences from the texts to put them in Mnemosyne. I remember that the official subtitles weren't as accurate as I'd like, but as my ear improved, I corrected them myself. In order to work with the videos I prefer jMemorize, because it let me set the repetition intervals manually (someone here recommended that to me). I didn't find it useful to get the subtitles translated though. And so, How did it go? Well, when you have sentences in your SRS that you have not only read but also heard a lot of times, somehow it makes a difference, but honestly, I don't know if it is worth it considering all the time wasted preparing the material. I reckon that once you're at an intermediate level, having audio for your sentences doesn't help that much. I can remember sentences from books or internet blogs equally well. On the other hand, I do think that the listening practise is invaluable and, as has been said, you get a much more colloquial language than the one usually found in books and newspapers. Edited by Javi on 11 July 2010 at 12:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5077 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 8 of 11 11 July 2010 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder if a kind of reverse L-R is possible with this kind of thing, in addition to putting the phrases into SRS. What I mean is, I wonder if you can use the transcripts while watching the TV show and have a similar effect as L-R. It's the complete reverse of the concept though in most cases, because often it's taking from English shows or movies, but I think in general it could work in a similar fashion. The only difference is you're seeing the words in your target language and listening in English. Hmm. I think I'll give this a try sometime.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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