It’s really tedious to go through the subtitles because reading through the entire script here on LingQ takes so long and is boring because I just want to watch the show. Yeah thats a good idea to watch the show with English subtitles first and then watch it again without subtitles.
Yeah I wouldn’t waste my time with that unless my vocabulary was so bad I could barely understand anything. That said, in early stages, I find it’s useful to load the subtitles into lingQ just as an eyeball check to see exactly how many of the words I don’t know, then I can gauge how likely/unlikely it is that I will understand.
If there is more than 15% or thereabouts unknown words it’s likely I’ll barely understand anything.
In that case if I still wanted to watch I’d use English subs most likely.
Okay new advice: Play around with the migaku add on. (https://www.migaku.io/) It costs like $5/month, but there is a free trial.
This thing is so cool I’m actually upset I didn’t install it earlier.
Two big things that Language Reactor doesn’t do (or at least I don’t think it does)
- It has a “skip mode” so that it auto fasts forwards at 8x speed when dialogue isn’t playing.
- It has an auto pause mode for unknown words. It’s way more “flow state” to watch a show this way. (You have to either manually mark them as known or import an anki deck that will mark all your mature cards as known.)
- It auto compresses the entire episode so that you can listen to a show passively (cutting an episode down to just the dialogue)
(Make sure you add a destination in the settings part in Anki, so it saves it) - It is way easier to make better Anki cards for +1 sentences.
This is my new favorite language learning toy! It’s a little technical to get it running if you haven’t used Anki before, but it’s worth it.
So yeah, best option, watch the episode with dual subtitles to get what’s going on if your comprehension is very low. Go back through with the skip mode turned on and NL subtitles blurred (and mine Anki cards if that’s your thing), then throughout the day you can passively immerse in the show’s audio track.
Late to this, but just wanted to add my own experience. I have never once used native language subs, aside from checking on something important that I just couldn’t figure out. My method has been to read in my target language (again, using my native langauge every now and then to check something I couldn’t figure out) and listen in the TL too. I have to say, I firmly belive that my comprehension of the spoken language is a lot better than it should be when I factor in how many raw hours of listening I’ve done.
It does take a long time until you begin to feel progress, much longer than if you were checking the translation and deliberately trying to learn words and phrases, although that’s a somewhat false sense of progress, IMO.
Trust me though, in the long run (I mean really long run) you’ll soar past those taking the translation/deliberate study approach. The hard part is to remain motivated whilst not understanding a great deal. It takes MASSIVE listening and reading for it to work, but at least it’s both more natural, and a less taxing way to learn a language, and as I said, the “end” result will be better.