Comment by borroka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by borroka | Hacker News Reader

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I speak English and Spanish well, I'd say fluently (my native language is neither English nor Spanish). I studied English in high school (2 hours a week), but I first chatted with native speakers ~ 15 years ago. I have been living in the US for 10 years and I use English continuously: I read in English, I listen to the radio in English, podcasts, TV. I have a very rich vocabulary, I'd say in the top 15% of native English speakers. For the life of me, I cannot watch movies without subtitles. That does not happen with podcasts, radio, or live talks. It is not that I understand nothing, but I struggle. My hypothesis is that the movie dialogue is not "natural" or "intuitive" and I cannot predict in some way what will be said. That prediction—I hypothesize—is needed when, allow me to use this image, the language is still not "yours". I still make mistakes when writing, I forget "s" all the time when using the third person and other minor mistakes that native speakers basically never make. I just don't feel the language they way I feel my native language.

I have yet to meet someone who has learned a language in their 20s and became as fluent as they are in their native language. The brain is increasingly less plastic the older we get and that is undoubtedly true for anyone who is not living in fantasy world for both motor and cognitive abilities.

PS, I am sure there are some typos, despite me having read my post a few times.

I'm American and watch movies with subtitles. The audio balance is generally fucked up and there's some weird fuzziness to the sound or people suddenly start whispering only to have massive explosions and metal being torn apart 5 seconds later. (Yes, I know people say to adjust audio balance and settings but it doesn't fix the problem.) It's impossible to follow the dialogue otherwise.

I'm fine with watching TV without subtitles because usually it's made with the assumption that people actually want to hear the dialogue.

My wife and I both constantly complain about the voice level in movies and TV. We've even hooked up a nice stereo system and let it calibrate itself, only to find out that we had to crank the center speaker up to hear them properly. And for crappy audio that isn't properly stereo, that still doesn't help because too much goes through the center speaker.

I'd say the main difference for me is that I have no problem whatsoever understanding movies in my native language. I love watching movies and it is quite frustrating for me not being able to get the dialogue as clearly as I get it in my native language.

I think it’s just the way American movies are produced. 80s and 90s movies are no problem for me. Starting around the 2000s I can’t pick up half of what they say. I have American friends who use subtitles for the same reason.

I have no trouble listening to dialogue in movies in my second language, so I think comprehension isn’t the problem.

I never have problem hearing what is said, but I continually have to turn music down! It's almost normal to have a scene with quiet talking, then scene with really loud music, then quiet talking.

So I guess for people who don't adjust the volume throughout, either the music is way too loud or the dialogue is often inaudible. I don't get why music in movies is so often so relatively loud. Not sure if it's just US movies or not.

But mostly I watch movies/series with subtitles, in other languages than English - as a side benefit, don't even have to turn it up when planes go over!

You are not alone. I have a friend who has the same issue with French. I don't. I'm not sure what the root cause is, maybe our brains are wired differently. Amd he's invested a ton more time in learning it.

There's a big difference between learning a language to a useful level and learning like a native speaker.

I am fortunate to live in a multilingual country, and it is obvious when experts and politicians are speaking in their mother tongue[1] versus in one of the other national languages or even in english. However, we judge them by what they have to say and how they express it[2], not by their accents or minor solecisms.

For what it's worth, the US State Department has ranked their experiences with teaching languages to anglophones going on foreign assignment, which corroborates my (and my friends' and colleagues') experience of closer to 2 years than to 30 for an 80-20 knowledge:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677256

[1] which is not necessarily what the academies and middlebrows of other countries would consider the "correct" form of "their" language https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351229

[2] Somewhere I heard the joke that french politics is full of dull people attempting to sound intellectual, but english politics is full of educated people attempting to sound common. Our politics is closer to the former than the latter. I just heard an interview with a train driver on the radio, and although her vocabulary revealed frequent repetition, she did her best to speak with a "langage soutenu" (a refined style, as opposed to the "langage de la rue", of the streets).

Luxembourg?

Cât pe ce. Follow the second link :-)

TIL the CFL network is complex enough to have a circuit.

Bonus wiki: https://lb.wikipedia.org/

Do you translate English and Spanish into your native language in your head, or can you parse the meaning fluently without doing so?

As an English speaker I lose track of what people are saying in films. It took me forever to learn how much what people say in films matters and isn't just background noise that fills in the space around action scenes. The combination of visual and music is usually enough to derive the meaning and feeling anyway.

I can parse the meaning fluently. I'd say I noticed English becoming its own entity (that is, I stopped translating a high speeds between my native language and English) a few years ago, although some days are better than others.

Can corroborate even as an American native English speaker - movie dialogue and music lyrics in English were hard for me to understand until I was in my mid to late teens. I'm not sure why that is.

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