Is anyone using and getting the most of the Netflix import functionality? I was excited to use it to study alongside video, but it doesn’t seem worth it without video because I could just go read other “reading friendly” texts. And also, even a 30 minute show would take forever to read through and not be engaging without video. Thoughts?
I think it’s a good feature but not as good as reading a book. I am a beginner at Chinese and I like Japanese anime so I tried watching an anime in Japanese and then importing the subs into LingQ and I enjoyed rereading it in Chinese. However I’m focusing on reading a novel in Chinese at the moment instead of reading more Netflix shows so I guess you can say it’s not as good a feature as it might seem. But I plan to read more shows using it.
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I prefer importing short novels or podcasts to be honest. Netflix and TV shows aren’t too meaningful in text-format IMO.
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For movies or shows on Netflix I find Language Reactor to be more useful. Reading the text from the transcript is really hard to follow imo. You don’t know who is talking in many cases, or what they are talking about, as the language alone may be a bit vague and there are visual things that you aren’t aware of.
This also makes the reading of the transcript very boring. Compared to a book that has descriptions of the environment and other visual cues, the book is much better. I do think the language of the movies is probably more “realistic” in a sense so I do think it’s useful in the context of real world language compared to a book or it’s dialogue even, but again, much better probably to use Language Reactor with it. Although, you have to watch out here too, because often the subtitles don’t match exactly what is said.
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It seems like most films and TV series these days aren’t very dialog-heavy, and the transcripts are often pretty light reading – unless you’re watching My Dinner with Andre or something similar.
I’ve watched hour-long episodes of high concept dramas whose transcripts were only 20 pages long or so. I’ve pretty much given up on importing text content from Netflix and just stick to novels, radio dramas, and podcasts.
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Netflix imports come quite “unpolished” and hence do not serve that much for reading practice. However, there are other ways to benefit from the Netflix transcripts. Here a selection of my favorite interactions with Netflix lessons from the last years:
- Vocabulary: just focus on the blue and yellow words. This helps you to get a good overview of new and difficult vocabulary that eventually appears in the show. This is especially recommendable if new words are below 15%, since otherwise this gets imo to strenuous.
- focus on specific scenes: If you identified special scenes while watching the show, you may want to focus just on them. Create a PDF of the transcript and make short lessons from the scenes you want to study.
- Splitscreen show and LingQ. Here are different ways to go about it. I prefer to watch a scene or two and then pause the series and review briefly the LingQ lesson. The less unknown words you have in a lesson, the more you can watch at once without that the reviewing gets to tedious.
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Since this thread is about what kind of content is or isn’t worth importing into LingQ:
We are launching a beta for an AI conversational partner. You can practice chatting in your target language, and with the click of a button you can import your conversation as a LingQ lesson.
We’d love to get your feedback on it - Let me know if you want to join the list of beta testers.
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