Hacker News Reader

Comment by z_open | Hacker News Reader

The machine generated content was already bad. I don't know if this AI transition will make it better or worse but I swear Duolingo was among the worst of apps I tried. People say it's ok to use supplementary when you have a 10 or 15 minute break but I think sentence mining or watching YouTube videos with subtitles is a better use of those minutes. I avoid telling giving this advice to people in real life because it seems dismissive of the time they are spending.

View on HN

I realize lots of people have learned languages by watching movies in the target language and reading subtitles in their native language, but I have found that to be highly difficult. I guess everyone is different, but given that the vast majority of people who read something while listening to something else will either comprehend something from one and nothing from the other, or worst case, get nothing from either, it seems likely that doing so to learn a language is not optimum.

I could perhaps see this method as more effective in cases where the 2 languages are similar enough that there is some "lining up" between what you read and hear, but where the words are completely dissimilar and even sentence structure is completely different, I just don't see it as any better than a brute force method of learning.

In my opinion, watching movies is ineffective until you can read the subtitles in the target language. This is at the B1/B2 level. Before that you're just focusing on the native language.

Once you hit the B levels, things get easier. But it's uphill until then and tutors or courses are your best bet to get there.

You've got it the wrong way around there. The spoken language should be the language you're trying to learn, the subtitles should be in your native language. Of course that'll not help you learn to read a foreign language.

I had a friend who was a translator for Nintendo and could translate across 12 different languages. He said after he had the first few learned, he would learn new languages by re-watching his favorite shows with both audio and subtitles in the language of interest.

I agree with the above poster that it’s a better use of 10-15 minutes. But not native shows/tv. Most languages have all sorts of content targeted at learners, sometimes even broken out by level. The Dreaming Spanish YouTube channel is an example.

But the challenge is you end up spending those 10-15 minutes researching content to use for practice! (I’m exaggerating of course, as once you find a few that’s usually hours and hours of material).

The technique here is called “comprehensible input”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com