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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

It's a cool idea, but unfortunately subtitles are notoriously inaccurate. Even in normal translations, you lose context and meaning due to cultural and structural differences in the language whose intents are difficult or even impossible to preserve. Add in the space and time constraints of subtitles, and you're basically forced to provide a bad translation of what's actually happening. This is especially true for poetry, lyrics, and jokes. And that's of course assuming that the translator is any good at it, or hasn't inserted politically motivated inaccuracies (most commonly with sexuality for translations to English). I've seen some HORRIBLY inaccurate subtitles and dubs, even by professionals (cough Akira cough), even to the point where the "translation" is a complete fabrication in some places.

Movies with subtitles are a nice aide, but to properly learn a language, you must learn it IN the language, WITH the attached culture.

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Thank you! I don't agree. I tested it heavily, and if the sync is correct, most of the time it actually seems to be one of the best way to understand complicated expressions.

Also, please read my comment. It is not about learning a language, it is about learning new words/expressions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627899

Thoughts on subtitles also in the language you're learning? My sense is that this helps with my comprehension, but it may also be a crutch.

Unfortunately, they're no help on Netflix, because they apparently farmed dubbing and subtitles out to two different teams that came up with independent translations.

I don’t think it’s just that they contracted subtitles and dubbing to different teams. The requirements are different.

This is particularly true in Japanese, the space constraints on speech and normal modes of expression are very different.

The original English, literal meaning of the Japanese audio, and Japanese subtitles all differ significantly.

Comparing the English subtitles and Japanese doesn’t work very well for language study. Mostly you just have to look each Japanese word you don’t know up in a dictionary...

That's a popular beginner complaint on /r/learnspanish, where I try to help people, but it's a weird fixation.

Deviating every once in a while from 1:1 dub:sub matchup is not even close to an obstacle to language learning. In fact, if anything, you hear and read two different ways to express the same thing at once.

If you depend on 1:1 matchup, I'm not sure you were consuming either dubs nor subs in a way that's all that productive to language learning. Consider relaxing and getting used to fuzzier comprehension which is necessary for transcending to conversational speed+slang.

Also, I recommend graduating to reading books ASAP to avoid languishing in the limbo of Netflix for language learning.

The ones I've tried aren't deviating every once in a while; they're using completely different translations.

I find that challenging because I've focused on reading for so long that I'm severely under-developed on my understanding of vernacular, spoken language. The upshot of that being, if the subtitles and audio differ significantly, my brain handles it about the same way as if I'm watching with English subtitles: The ears get disconnected from the brain, and I default to reading without really listening.

To anyone who may be discouraged using subtitles, for most Romance languages, subtitles for native rate speech allow you a fighting chance of a general understanding of what was said, even if they are not word-for-word. Without subtitles, if you are like me, you are still frustrated in your ability to figure out what exactly was said. I've heard that focusing on pronunciation first helps a lot, and I may need to go back to learning the IPA for real.

Even English subtitles on English movies are often inaccurate and missing key words.

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