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Comment by BrandonMarc | Hacker News Reader

How do you use Netflix for language learning? I'm curious.

Watch content in the language you are learning. Its pretty helpful if you are not surrounded by native speakers. I think most of my friends who grew up in Asia all watched Friends.

I watch shows with Spanish dubs + Spanish subs. Since they are translations, the language is simplified.

At first it was super slow. I paused almost every frame to look up words or phrases with google translate. If I still can't divine the phrase, I switch the the English subs for that frame.

Over time I just got better. Now I can watch shows without much pausing or word lookups.

I can read Spanish fairly well these days. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work out my hearing/speaking muscles at all and I have to train those independently.

The upside is that I can netflix & chill with a Spanish speaker.

The catch is that this isn't a good strategy for shows that you particularly want to enjoy. Translations lose pretty much all the character, becomes robotic, and the characters are spread between the same 2-3 voice actors.

It helps a lot with understanding spoken language in a variety of settings, pronunciation, idioms, and all the other little things that make language appear natural. Watching movies and TV shows in a foreign language that you already know somewhat but aren't comfortable with yet is tremendously helpful, and it's also fun. Great way to help become fluent.

Even if you barely know the language, I've found it beneficial to listen to foreign language audio with subtitles (YMMV). It mean that when I actually try to learn parts of the language, I already have somewhat of a feel for it, so what I'm learning solidifies into something usable more quickly, and I don't spend as much time stumbling with pronunciations/verb conjugations etc.

My problem with foreign audio + English subtitles (if that's what you meant) is that my brain just reads the subtitles and tunes out the audio for the most part.

I think anything is better than nothing, though. I personally watch movies/shows now always with foreign subtitles.

I hate subtitles that aren't in the same language as the audio, that's just incredibly confusing. Having both in the foreign language requires a higher level of proficiency, sure, but I find it a lot more rewarding.

I would imagine it would help a lot with learning cultural idioms as well. Given that a large percentage of the mannerisms my friends and I use are copied from TV, it would be invaluable to be exposed to the language elements which speakers of that language actually use.

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