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Better not to watch with subtitles? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 17 of 64 05 February 2012 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I've learned languages in immersion and non-immersion environments so I know the difference. Disagree as much as you like, there are no absolutes about this. This has been gone over many times, and it's only tangential here, so I won't say more. Off the top of my head: Total immersion is a crock! Immersion experiment Google search for "immersion" @HTLAL 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4497 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 18 of 64 05 February 2012 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
This is a very dishonest response, I'm not sure if I should reply at all. If you deliberately pick such ridiculous examples, every method will seem useless. Edited by LaughingChimp on 05 February 2012 at 9:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4490 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 19 of 64 05 February 2012 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I thought it would be a good idea too to watch a film with L1 and L2 subtitles underneath one another, but I found it hard to extract the subtitles. I have a Mac and that might add to the difficulty. I managed to do it with one DVD but it took a whole day to do, and the payoff wasn't worth it. (There is a subtitle extractor available for macs but you have to write Hangeul letters for letters that the program doesn't recognize and for a two-hour movie it took about six hours to do this.) There are not many files of Korean subtitles that I have found for Korean movies available on the Internet. So I have had to ditch the idea of getting subtitles for Korean movies and dramas and watching the movies and dramas with the Korean and English subtitles together on the screen. (I need the English subtitles to understand what the Korean subtitles mean at my stage of learning.) Later on, when I get really into listening, I am going to pay a Korean person to read translated stuff including movie scripts. There are books in Korean bookshops for teaching English through movie scripts, and they have the English dialog on one page and the Korean dialog on the other page. Unfortunately, the audio of the movies is in English, but I can get a Korean person to read the dialog in Korean and make recordings of them reading. It will be almost the same as watching a movie. The other problem I have is that even if I manage to extract the Korean and English subtitles of movies and put them on the screen together, the people in the movies speak so fast that I can't follow them. I have to slow the movie right down to about 25% of the normal speed, and that is another Herculean task in itself. I have tried this, using iMovie and Audacity on my Mac, and succeeded, but once again, the result was not worth all the effort I put in. If I pay someone to do the reading, I can control how fast that person speaks. At my stage of study, I need someone to read VERY slowly so that my ear can keep up with them. My reading speed is also very slow too. (I personally find Hangeul hard to read.)
Cathrynm, I used to tell my Korean adult students who were learning English conversation (most of them were advanced, just not good at conversation) to do this when watching English-language movies on TV. I felt that they were concentrating too much on reading the Korean subtitles to really listen to the spoken English. (Nearly all English-language movies and programs on Korean TV have Korean subtitles or are dubbed in Korean.) Their English comprehension was good enough not to need the subtitles to get the gist of what they were hearing; all they needed was to do more intensive listening to pick up English expressions and idioms.
That's a good point, clumsy, that you may be practicing reading rather than listening.
That's been my experience so far, The Real CZ, almost word for word. I do think I pick up more Korean when I watch the shows raw (I watch some of them raw because the subtitled versions of my favorite shows come out later), but not that much more. I recognize a few words here and there, especially when there is a lot of repetition as there is in historical dramas which is what I mainly watch, but I am not picking up whole sentences or even phrases that much (and not picking up much grammar either). That's why I am a bit concerned. Immersion may not work for me (watching unsubtitled dramas and movies is a kind of immersion I feel). Maybe it's also the type of dramas I watch. I like watching historical dramas more than contemporary ones and the language in historical dramas may not really be that useful to me. For instance, I know the words for "war", "general", "arrow", "sword", "rebellion", "prisoner", "king", "queen", "attack!" and so on, but how many times would I need to use these words in normal life? Also, the constructions of the sentences might be a little old-fashioned. I know the verb endings they use in these dramas are obsolete. Maybe this kind of 'immersion' is too passive? And I need to interact with a native speaker to get proper immersion? Also, subconsciously I may be resisting learning the language from listening to it. Because of the number of speech levels that exist in Korean, I worry a lot that I may learn one speech level and use it in the wrong situation in real life. Going back to historical dramas, the king often uses the impolite informal form (because he speaking to his "inferiors" all the time), and if I spoke like that in real life, it would not be appropriate in many situations. For example, I would not use "Kaja!" ("Let's go!") or "Mweora?!!" ("What?!!") when speaking with peers I don't know that well or with elders as that would be rude, but I hear the main character use these forms in the dramas I watch all the time. I try to be familiar with the "yo" (informal polite) level when learning Korean, as that's the 'standard' speech level for me, and if I hear any other speech level, I feel a bit insecure. I can't relax when I listen to Korean and take it all in as I would another language that didn't have more than one speech level. And perhaps the tension I feel (subconsciously) is acting as a kind of block which prevents me from absorbing the language. With English, you don't have to worry about that because most of the time, you can use what you hear with all sorts of people. With French (another language I studied), there are two speech levels, but for some reason I didn't worry about that much when listening to French and I felt comfortable using the two different speech levels. I think that's because French (for me) is very similar to English in grammar and in other things. So maybe Korean is such an alien language for English-speakers that listening to it while watching dramas can be overwhelming especially when there isn't that much context to provide clues as to what they are talking about.
That is a very good point, jeff lindvist. Since I understand more Korean now, I have noticed that the people writing subtitles employ a lot of creative license when composing the subtitles, and often, there is a poor match with the Korean dialog. I suppose the subtitles are there so that the audience can watch and understand the drama and be entertained by it, and not to give them a lesson in the Korean language.
I tried to study Korean by watching the shows with English subtitles and trying to find the Korean word for the English word I read by looking up the dictionary and trying to recognize the Korean word in the speech I heard. I learned a few nouns this way but not much else. I certainly did not learn many phrases this way and I found it to be of very little help in learning grammar. Definitely, watching dramas (subtitled and raw) would be of help to me later when I am at a higher level, but it looks like it is of minimal benefit to me now as a beginner/low-intermediate level learner, and actually discourages me somewhat. It reinforces my view that Korean is such an impenetrable language to learn. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 20 of 64 05 February 2012 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Well, you really haven't, anyway.
Every method can be done right or wrong, and wrong is people's favourite choice most of the time, usually due to oversimplification and lack of thinking, so there's a need to explain why some things do not work. Since the main focus here is subtitles, I've already suggested starting a new thread if you want to discuss immersion. It's usually useful to use search engines and review old threads on any subject first, though, so I just provided some quick links. You call that dishonest? Up to you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 21 of 64 05 February 2012 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
As I said, I find little use in target audio + native subtitles, the less the more different both languages are, unless you're really good at TL, but then you'd probably not need subtitles anyway... Actually, that's why I said there's a need to wait until you can read at audio speed and you do not miss a lot of stuff. It is only beyond this point (say roughly a CEFR A2/B1 level) where native audio + subtitles immersion is actually useful. I've even developed a simple program to do some neat tricks with SRT subtitles (as opposed to superimposed subtitles). The most obvious are 1) Delay subtitles roughly a couple secs so you can't read until you hear, so you effectively use subtitles as a backup for any words you may have missed. You should quickly adapt to reading only what you didn't pick up, because you don't need the rest. 2) Make subtitles display our two secs BEFORE words are spoken, so you know what they're going to say and can check pronunciation, see if you actually hear all the words, etc. Of course, as Jeff mentioned, I'm assuming quality subtitles here, i.e. minimal differences, if any, between audio and text. opensubtitles.org has worked excellently for me so far. Edited by mrwarper on 06 February 2012 at 12:00am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6348 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 22 of 64 06 February 2012 at 4:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I think it depends on how one defines "immersion". If it's just being exposed to native material all the time, without paying attention, I think it's near worthless. If you are actively studying for some hours out of the day, with some translation thrown in, talking to natives, and really paying attention to things going on around you, I think it's hard to beat. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 23 of 64 06 February 2012 at 5:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Leo :) My bad, then. I assumed "immersion" would be understood by everyone as being surrounded, or at least confronted with native materials only. In the case of the OP that would be TL audio + TL subtitles.
As I said, any method is beneficial at all stages, but not equally beneficial at all of them. Especially at the lower levels, immersion alone is immensely inefficient and almost any other method will provide better results, because you understand next to nothing, hence my warning about the usefulness of TL video and subtitles depending on levels, with which the OP apparently agrees by the end of post #19. After all isn't the forum a place to share experiences so we all learn from others' success and mistakes? Then it would be almost criminal not to warn people. Which obviously doesn't mean I must be agreed with. Since we had so many discussions on immersion (not restricted to video input) in the past, I thought I'd just throw in a few links, and maybe start new threads so we keep focusing on the video + subtitles in this one -- I really wanted to see what others had to say about this, or comment on my subtitle technique proposals. Edited by mrwarper on 06 February 2012 at 7:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6348 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 24 of 64 06 February 2012 at 5:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Personally, I think it was yet another well thought out, helpful mrwarper post. Keep 'em coming! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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