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I saw and enjoyed Amelie dispite the fact that Audrey Tautou’s eyes in this movie poster really creeped me out. |
I don’t enjoy watching foreign films with subtitles. I’m almost always glad that I did, but it’s work for me — and I usually go to the movies to relax. There is also, I’m sure, some discomfort associated with my not being a successful foreign language student when I was in school, doing only slightly better in Latin than in French and Spanish classes. ..and references to my fairly severe hearing difficulties probably provide more consolation to me than a real excuse for my academic failures. Never really had to listen to Latin.
But I remember a conversation at one of the foreign language teachers conferences I’ve spoken at about how immigrants are developing their English language skills by switching on the closed caption feature of their TVs — and that’s the memory that surfaced when I learned about AnySubs. It’s a collaborative archive of files that provide subtitles for movies, operating along side the movie file. Here’s how it works.
- You go to AnySubs, and type the title, or a string from the title of the movie you wish to read along with. I happened to have an MP4 of Mary Poppins in an external hard drive. With the proper number of Ps, I find an entry for the 1964 movie and learn that it got a 7.6 user rating from IMDb.
- Clicking the entry, I learn that there are two English subtitle files and one in Finish. One of the English files might be used by students with hearing deficiencies, but pretending I’m teaching Finish to my high schoolers, I click that entry and then click Download.
- The subtitle downloads are compressed. One I ran across last night was zipped (.zip), but this one is compressed in Roshal ARchive, or RAR (.rar) format. Fortunately, Stuffit Expander handles it flawlessly. Although there are others, the subtitle decompressed files I’ve downloaded were in SubRip format (.srt).
- After that, the process is simple, though I had to do some research to learn it — as the AnySubs site seems to be fairly Windows-centric.
The movie file (most formats seem to be workable) and the subtitles file must be in the same folder or directory, and they must have the same filename — except for the extension. Several movie players seem to support subtitles, but not QuickTime, at least from my experiments. So I re-acquired VLC, a cross-platform open source media player that handles a wide array of video and audio formats. Opening the movie file with VLC, the Finnish subtitles automatically appear, as I watch one of my children’s favorite childhood movies.
Now I can imagine developing my skills in this language (after mastering the vowels) by watching familiar movies and TV shows and making myself read the captions — or finding a Finnish film and applying English subtitles. But I suspect that language teachers can come up with some creative ways to use this.
What do you think?
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I’m an ELL teacher and I approve this idea. I always turn on subtitles/CC if it’s available, even on BrainPop videos. I’ve heard one of the reasons that Icelanders have such a high literacy rate is that most of their TV watching is close captioned. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s plausible. My wife speaks Spanish, so it’s doubly entertaining to watch a Spanish language film with her and have her tell me which subtitles are mistaken…
I’m not sure if he used subtitles, or just listened to the audio, but I met an older Vietnamese fellow in Saigon who had taught himself English from watching American movies. I shot some video on the day I met him and it’s now been viewed over 300,000 times. He’s quite a character (was,he’s now deceased) and was a real joy to talk to. I won’t embed a link to the video since that might put me in your spam folder. Search on YouTube for “Bill from Saigon” and you’ll find my video (username = barrynabdahl).
What the heck, here’s the link just in case it works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whV_oKnRXSA
I know the dialogue for Zatoichi: the Blind Swordsman without turning on the subtitles now. But I still can’t speak the lines in Japanese.
I like to read my TV, so I’ve left closed-captioning on since it was first available on my TV. When my son was in 1st grade, he was sick for 9 days. After watching cartoons all day for 9 days, his reading went up a grade level. My cousin Elmer in Mexico taught himself English by watching subtitled movies; he became nearly fluent that way. When I’m trying to bring my Spanish back up to an adequate level for major translating, I watch Spanish-language telenovelas with closed-captioning so I can read and listen. It’s the best way to watch a Shakespeare play, such as Branagh’s Hamlet because it’s like having the playbook right in front of you. Lots of YouTube videos include lyrics. Ted Talks include transcripts. I’m so fond of closed-captioning that I find it painful to watch movies in theaters–“What did he say?” Who knows. If it was a good film, I have to watch it again on DVD to catch the parts I missed. Jim Trelease reports on the advanced reading skills of Finnish children because they’re forced to read Finnish when they watch TV. Thanks for reporting on this tool.
I believe subtitles and closed captioning can definitely be a great tool as an educator. It allows students struggling in language or ELL to focus on content (video) as well as words and structure. The visibility of subtitles on screen can be a great visual to a learner. In college while taking spanish, it was often always encouraged to watch spanish television and out on the subtitles. Why would’nt this work for English as well? I think it would be great.
The video should be in the target language, i.e., the language you are learning. If you are already familiar with the American film, what is your motivation to read the subtitles? You must be motivated to want to know what is going on. That will make you read.
Using subtitles is a great tool for English Language Learners. In fact, it reminds me of a friend I have who was new to the country in high school and she learned English primarily through watching television shows like, Friends. The use of subtitles would be great to assist these students in learning English.
This is a very interesting concept. I find this very helpful for a student of foreign languages trying to fine tune their speech.
Very usefull to watch film with subs in 2 languages.
I use http://dblsubs.com convert it.