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Understand TV in 30 days | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5661 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 1 of 14 29 October 2014 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure if there's been a topic on this outside of emk's log, but i thought it would be interesting to do a bit more discussion on the idea as it sounds really promising. I've started a deck from a Chinese and can already feel some progress after only a few days, but Chinese isn't a new language for me. I really wanted to try it with Basque or Greek, but have been surprised at how hard it is to find a movie/TV series with both subtitles and audio in the TL.
EDIT: I meant to mention that the idea is pulled from this post over at the learnlangs wiki. Edited by Crush on 29 October 2014 at 2:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4145 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 14 29 October 2014 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd be interested in improving my listening comprehension in Chinese, too. My reading
comprehension is far superior, on a number of levels. Reading the subtitles, I can understand usually quite a lot, but without them, I can't process the audio quick enough. Also, having done all my Anki reviews Hanzi->Pinyin+Definition, I often can only understand words in their written form, even when I can clearly hear all the phonemes (so, sometimes, I actually understand a word only after looking up its possible spellings with an IME, without actually looking up the meaning itself). Sometimes I can recall a word upon hearing it, but only after a couple seconds (like yesterday happened with 日子 - "day," which I'd understand (and be able to pronounce) instantly, if I encountered it in the written form). I hope I'm not writing too much about myself (if I am, I'll edit this post accordingly), but it goes to show how the way you study affects your results. I've heard of a couple ways of tackling such problems, namely: bloodhound listening, and Subs2SRS. I'm also considering making a new deck based on my last one, except going from Pinyin to Hanzi. Bloodhound listening requires a lot of focus, and I just tend to try to recall what a word meant every now and then anyway. Going through 13k words Hanzi->Pinyin+Definition took me roughly 125 hours, and I'd presume going through most of that again, but Pinyin- >Hanzi wouldn't take much less than that, so it also seems a fairly long-term solution. Plus, all the homophones would be a real mess. So, TL;DR, I think I'll also (at least try to) participate in testing this method. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5058 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 14 29 October 2014 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's been little innovation in the past few years in language-learning. Kudos to Sprachprofi. This may be what finally spurs me into using Anki and subs2srs. Emk wrote a tutorial for the people who are familiar with Anki but it looks complicated to me and not easy to follow the directions. It would be nice to have one that could show anyone how to use this from scratch. This has the potential to help a lot of people learn a language more efficiently and more enjoyably.
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5661 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 4 of 14 29 October 2014 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've had a similar experience to yours, the first time around when a sentence has several words i'm less familiar with but passively know, i can't understand the sentence. After reading the subtitles and glancing over the English translation it generally all makes sense. I think this will help my listening comprehension enormously, so i'll continue with it for Mandarin.
But i'd also like to test it out for a language i'm not familiar with, maybe Basque, Greek, or Korean. For Korean i've found several series that have been subbed in English, but not knowing any Korean myself finding Korean subtitles is difficult, in particular since i can't even check if the subtitle matches or not. I'm curious how Sprachprofi found subtitles for the Japanese series as well as how the subtitles being written in Japanese came into play. I'd love to watch some sort of Korean cartoon.. EDIT: I agree with you, iganamon, it seems like a really cool way to pick apart a language. I think emk's tutorial was a bit more complicated because of the format of the subtitles, if you've got a normal .srt file it shouldn't be too difficult. I managed to get my first movie converted without too much trouble, the hardest part was actually finding the subtitles. Edited by Crush on 29 October 2014 at 1:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 14 29 October 2014 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sprachprofi's original article can can be found here. It was a pretty cool experiment: Starting from scratch, she managed to understand a single Japanese TV series within 30 days, studying 1 hour per day.
Unfortunately, at this point, all I have are hypotheses. For actual informed opinions, you'll need to wait until I make more progress with my little subs2srs experiment. :-) Still, here are a few thoughts on the subject; take them with a grain of salt. Why I like television. Now, personally, I'm a huge fan of comprehensible television, for several reasons: 1. It's fun, because there's a large commercial industry that works hard to make it addictive. 2. TV series offer multiple seasons of audio on the same topics, with the same speakers, making narrow listening easy. 3. It offers more natural, conversational audio than most audiobooks. 4. It comes with pictures, which tend to help a lot. Also, I know from first-hand experience (and from other people's logs) that I can start out with one long series, then move on to another, and another, and after repeating this 5 or 6 times, it's possible to start channel surfing with decent comprehension. Why I think subs2rs is promising. I've used subs2srs before with intermediate French, and I rather liked it. (Though I always budget a weekend to get it working.) Here's why I decided it was worth imitating Sprachprofi's experiment: 1. We know that both Assimil and Listening/Reading work well. Subs2srs uses the same L2 audio/L2 text/L1 audio combination. It's the same idea, in a slightly different format. 2. Subs2srs allows me to work with audio well beyond my natural abilities. Right now, I'm working with roughly B1 narration and C1 dialog, despite the fact that I'm starting from zero. And yet I can still find quite a few useful cards. 3. I've successfully shown that I can use Anki + Assimil to learn a language in one hour per week and still make progress. So anything that starts out in Anki is great. 4. Subs2srs reduces the time I spend on data entry. Sure, it takes me a day or two to find something with good subtitles, convert everything to digital format, and kick it into submission. But the average movie gives me over 1,000 cards. 5. I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity and guessing and puzzling things out. So I like Assimil, I like extensive methods, and I like being happily confused by Spanish. Things I don't yet know. Hey, this is an experiment, right? 1. How easy will it be to transition from subs2srs to "real" television? 2. How does this approach compare to Assimil? 3. Can somebody actually make this work without having learned at least one language to the intermediate level in the past?
For major languages, I've found the best approach is to start a thread asking for cool stuff with subtitles and make a page on the unofficial wiki.
The hard part is getting accurate subtitles in either *.srt or VOBSUB format, and getting them correctly aligned with a video file. In my experience, this requires a different approach almost every time. But this may just be because the French only recently started subtitling. Once you have the subtitles, and they're properly aligned with a video file, it's possible to write up a tutorial explaining the remaining steps in detail (or you could puzzle them out from my log). But it doesn't solve the hard part, which is getting everything into the right format in the first place, because that varies too much. Seriously, this can easily become a weekend project the first time, even if you're reasonably good with computers. But once you've got the deck, it's smooth sailing. Edited by emk on 29 October 2014 at 2:13pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5661 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 14 29 October 2014 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks emk, i meant to add a link to the original post by Sprachprofi. I was hoping you'd stop by. And that's a good idea, i've just asked for some suggestions.
And to your third question, i know Sprachprofi has a lot of experience learning languages and a good idea what to look for, but i think Japanese is different enough from the other languages they've studied to make a good case for new learners being able to pick up at least passive skills this way. I'd be interested to know the answer to this and your other two questions as well, though. The first question i think we'll find out for ourselves soon enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5032 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 7 of 14 29 October 2014 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is quite possibly the understatement of the century! I've spent two days struggling to get one show into a deck, and I've been using computers for 30 years.:-) Some of the problems I've had so far: - All the tools are written for Windoze users, I use Linux, so I've had to create a virtual machine. - Getting a srt file of a TV show in the first place, but eventually found a downloader. - Because I had to get the video from a different source (youtube) the timings don't line up. This is because the video source I found, left the commercials in, so I've spend a day chopping all that out. - The subtitles I have are for English, but there aren't any subtitles for the original Mandarin, which is a required field in the subs2srs program. subs2srs uses the original subtitles to know when to break-up the dialogue. I just loaded English subtitles in both native and translation fields, since I'm only interested in the audio/video anyway. - After 5 passes at getting this sorted out, I'm now in the process of editing subtitles times using Sub-Edit. - Editing subtitles for dialogue breaks in a language you don't yet know is a challenge to say the least. If someone is going to try this, then I would recommend buy a DVD boxset for TV series, or just get a film. Otherwise be prepared to learn a lot of stuff you didn't really want to know about video editing and sub-titles. :) So after my little moan, I can say doing the remaining 23 episodes should be quicker because I have all tools, I know where to get the files, I know HOW to use the tools now. I think films would definitely be easier since you're more likely to find the required sub-titles in both languages, and the source video for both subtitles will be the same and not require any editing. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5661 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 8 of 14 29 October 2014 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Though for Chinese there is a big advantage in that practically everything is subtitled in China. I believe the harder part for Chinese will be finding English subtitles. Many groups don't release "soft" subtitles, they're hardcoded into the movie/show. But if you want help with Chinese films/series, i'd be glad to help you sort some stuff out. I really wish there were a season of 爱情公寓 fully translated, the language used there is great, lots of useful phrases and vocab.
When i was choosing the first film to convert i discarded a bunch of them because i couldn't find subs for both languages. Once i found a Chinese film with English subs it was smooth sailing from there. I also use Linux but already had a VM set up since banks in China have the most antiquated security methods. At least now you can use Firefox, when i first got here you had to use IE with the bank's ActiveX plug-in... It's maybe not the ideal solution, but when you figure that one movie gives you over a thousand cards, you really don't need to boot into Windows/open up the VM that often. And that show isn't available elsewhere besides Youtube? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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