Oh boy, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up when you read that title… This week I wanted to talk about a language learning hack that many of you are already doing, but are not using to its full potential. First things first, if have a half hour, I highly recommend you watch Alexandra Stepien’s lecture below. She’s a lazy polyglot and claims you can learn a great deal by just being lazy. If you don’t have the time, take the five minutes to read this blog post and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what she’s talking about.
Oh, you’re still here? Where were we? So, as Alexandra points out, being lazy is many times, a blessing in disguise. Bill Gates once said:
,,I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
-Gill Bates
I already talked about how some Albanian friends of mine learned Italian by simply watching TV and movies. So why would I be talking about it again? I already talked about how conversation, writing, and integration are the pillars of language learning.
A TV show is really the perfect intersection between these things. You’ll be listening to a lot of conversation. I mean, proper pronunciation and all by people who are getting paid to speak because they are great at it. If you add shadowing to that, which essentially is imitating the speaker’s voice, you’ll also be speaking and memorizing sentences. You’ll be writing too! When you’re able to understand a sentence and can write it down, you can put that straight into a flashcard application like Anki. When Integration will come because you’ll be immersed in a virtual version of Paris, Istanbul, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, New Dehli, Buenos Aires, et cetera… You’ll have thousands of contextual cues. Learning by immersion is how we learned our mother tongues, and believe it or not, we can still learn this way. Remember my Albanian friends? As Alexandra points out, we are probably better at learning now than we were back then. We don’t need our Turkish friends pointing at a dog 10 times while saying köpek to understand that they mean köpek in fact means dog. We are picking up context far better than we ever could as kids! We understand emotions better and body language cues like never before! Literally. Before you go jump on the sofa and go on a Japanese binge of the Office, let’s talk subtitles.
Sub or no sub
Why is this a question? Of course you may think, subtitles, or how am I going to understand anything otherwise? Watch this:
Now imagine that the ‘passes’ are the subtitles, and that the moonwalking bear is your language listening, immersion, and everything else. It’s super distracting. How many times have you put subs in your own tongue and read them ANYWAYS? It’s just automatic. So subtitles, in your own tongue, are a big no-no. But what about subtitles in your target language? Ah, now it gets interesting and I think this is where Alexandra’s method might fall short. A 2016 study on watching subtitled films showed that, indeed, watching Downtown Abbey would be beneficial to native Spanish speakers’ English Listening-test scores. It also showed that watching with their native, Spanish subtitles, would help less than watching with no subtitles. Most notably, however, it showed that watching Downtown Abbey in English with English subtitles improved their Listening-test scores the most out of the other two conditions. Dingdingdingdingding I think we have something to off here. I mentioned in my previous TV show blogpost.
1. Pick a movie, tv-show, animated series in your target language.
2. Watch it with subtitles in your native language, mark down the times in which you hear sentences you want to learn.
3. Go back and copy these sentences down, understand them and practice them.
4. Repeat.
This still applies. What doesn’t apply is, forget the English subtitles (or your native language ones). You can still use language learning with Netflix, which has the added benefit of having a built in dictionary and ‘notepad’ for you to download phrases in the subs. I’m sorry for the misinformation I gave you in the past. There’s a lot of misinformation surrounding subtitles, like with cholesterol. There’s good subs, and bad subs, just like cholesterol. If any of you have or know about interesting research about watching tv or language learning in general, shoot me an email!
How about introducing some Netflix and chill to your language learning?
calypso
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