The article has been automatically translated into English by Google Translate from Russian and has not been edited.

How to learn English from films and TV shows in a year: personal experience

'14.04.2021'

Source: Vc.ru

The administrator and translator of the Kinaorot channel wrote for vc.ru a column on how to learn the language by watching films and TV shows in English, as well as the pros and cons of this approach.

Photo: Shutterstock

As a person who has completely unexpectedly gone from translating English to a translator widely known in very narrow circles, I will not deny myself the pleasure of repeating the educational program on the topic “How to Learn English from Movies”.

In fact, it is simple. The manual is based on the example of studying English, but is suitable for almost any language in which a sufficient number of films and series have been shot.

1. Take movie you know by heart, looked up to the holes and you can, moving your lips, repeat phrases behind the characters even when the sound is turned off, because someone is sleeping in the next room, and the cat’s gnawed on the headphone wire again. Well, any other film as close to the described condition as possible.

2. Watch him in English with English subtitles. An important point: leave Russian subtitles for aesthetes who love the original voice acting, but do not know the language. To learn the language, Russian subtitles are useful in much the same way as voiceover: you can learn three or four new words in a year. But that’s all. Simply put, Russian subtitles in language learning are useless.

3. The first time, even if you remember all the cues of the movie by heart, it will be very hard. Be patient and Google Translate in the next tab. Or look at the service with a built-in subtitle translator.

In my experience, in order to learn a new word, you need it to catch your eye at least 4 – 5 times in different films / series - the first two times you just google the translation, the next 2 – 3 times you’re all like this: “Oh, what- that familiar, I’ll remember now, I will remember ”- and still google it. From the sixth time, you just remember him. This is if you do not memorize new words separately, namely, memorize according to the frequency of their appearance in films and TV shows.

On the subject: How I taught English in movies and TV shows: 17 films by language levels. VIDEO

4. It's important Do not bother with 100% translation. You can try, but in reality it is a completely exhausting practice, which rather averts the desire to learn in this way than improves the results. To understand what the film is about, it’s enough to understand 80 – 90% of phrases consisting of commonly used expressions. Rarer words will learn over time.

5. It is worth, however, meticulously translate jokes. They do not affect the plot, as a rule, but understanding humor dramatically increases the ability to feel the language as such. Therefore, if the picture was obviously joked, but you didn’t understand how, then you can spend the extra half a minute to go to urbandictionary.com, but understand what’s what.

Here is the pleasure of having understood the joke, and the benefit - I have often seen certified translators who are lost in the simplest word game at the level of a primary school student. In live communication, it is the ability to understand and make jokes in the interlocutor’s language that distinguishes you from a robot, “just a tourist” and breaks the ice, as they say, placing your vis-a-vis towards you. And this is far more important than perfect grammar. Yes, any grammar, because most of the jokes in spoken English are already clogged with it.

6. Do not wait for quick results.. It is most useful for the time being until the English inspection becomes a habit and a need, and any dubbing will not cause persistent disgust as an attempt to rob in broad daylight, to deceive yourself with the fact that you look “just for fun”. Because the hobby, which has become a commitment, has already ruined many good undertakings.

At this pace, progress is likely to appear somewhere in a year. Perhaps, it will seem to someone a long time, but it is still better to pump the language for a year than to spend this year in dreams, that tomorrow I will go to the courses, and will be pumped for some miserable month.

7. A year later or at any other time when viewing with subtitles in the original language becomes a chore, need to increase the load, and watch without subs at all. Firstly, because the subtitles have worked out and now they are spinning idle - you already enriched your vocabulary and learned to hear someone else's speech not as an endless stream of gibberish, but as a set of completely distinguishable separate words.

On the subject: Why have you been learning English all your life, but can't learn: common mistakes

Secondly, because subtitles, no matter what they say, are still a little distracting from the picture. Now you need to start watching a movie in the original language without any prompts. At first it will be almost as difficult as switching from dubbing to subtitles in the original language: you will immediately find out how the subtitles were cheating, and to what extent you read, but did not hear, what they say on the screen business. Again, you have to pause, rewind difficult moments ... But still it will not be so hard. Still subtitling creates some basis.

8. Sign up as a volunteer in any translation project. “English as Work” has completely unexpected side effects, which I discovered when I translated two trailers of “Suicide Squad” with a difference of eight months.

These are the only two movie trailers in which there is Viola Davis. Due to Davis’s careless pronunciation, translating her remarks in the first video was more difficult than all the other moments combined. After eight months (and more than one and a half hundred translated trailers), it turned out to be no more difficult than a walk along the deck of a cruise ship in calm. Still, the need to translate everything (you can’t lay out a trailer in which you translated only what you understood and what you didn’t understand, then you thought it through) is pretty disciplining.

However, for a student learning a language this can be too heavy a burden - that is why it is better to still communicate with those who are already engaged in translations in order to receive help and share responsibility.

The result of this path will be a confident understanding of the language and not very competent, but confident pronunciation. You will be able to communicate without feeling the distance due to the difference of cultures.

9. Why not start right away with the courses? In principle, no one bothers. But the courses, after all, are time, money and just the feeling of a “big step”. Training at the cinema does not require time in addition to what you have already spent on the same movies and TV shows, it does not require money (except, uh, renting films) and certainly does not require any volitional effort, on which many good beginnings end without starting. In addition, the time of theory will come later, when the time comes to take up grammar.

A sense of language, acquired exclusively through live communication, is much more important than perfect literacy. But if you want to bring to your speech the gloss of a graduate, if not Oxford, then at least school, you need to tighten up the times with the articles.

This is the moment when You can sign up for classic courses, Skype courses, or simply take advantage of the tutorials, which you can now download even on Google Play. By the way, with the available base, you don’t even have to bother with courses with Russian-speaking teachers or from Russian-speaking authors - train immediately on media and on programs written by media for foreigners.

Follow success stories, tips, and more by subscribing to Woman.ForumDaily on Facebook, and don't miss the main thing in our mailing list

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By: XYZScripts.com