Saim wrote:I'm going to go back to watching TV shows. Instead of trawling the internet for shows with Chinese and English subtitles, I'll just watch whatever is available on Netflix. The "Language Learning with Netflix" app also lets you print out subtitles along with a translation, for the first episode of 奈何BOSS要娶我 (Well-Intended Love) I have a 20-page document, so that's quite a lot of easily-accessible material. I'll just make sure to keep using my Chinese pop up ad on (thankfully it works in Google Docs) and try to focus on "easy" sentences still.
I'm still going to add TTS to all my cards, copying out the audio from the show takes way too much time (if I really want authentic audio I can just rewatch episodes after having mined them). I also need to be able to copy and paste sentences (which is why "Language Learning with Netflix" is great), it was fun trying to figure out the pinyin for dialogue in the 择天记 anime but now I need to get through more material faster.
Yeah, this seems to be giving the fastest gains in comprehension of anything. I'll do this for a while until it's too boring and then move onto something else.
I might also start doing this for Hindi. I just watched the series
She, it was pretty moronic so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone (although I'm ashamed to admit I got kind of hooked), but I'm going go through the subtitles and make flashcards out of any unknown words. Hopefully next time I watch something in Hindi on Netflix I'll be able to use the Hindi subtitles, here I started with Hindi subtitles and then switched to English like I did with Sacred Games; I'm just not fast enough at reading Devanagari to be able to enjoy it. Yesterday I got through 4/16 pages of the first episode so even if I go at a slower pace if I do it every day I should be able to cover a lot of ground.
Another cool thing about Netflix subtitles is that it translates things said in English into shuddh Hindi. This would be annoying if I was a beginner or intermediate but at my level it's nice to come across these Sanskritisms, especially since here the amount of them isn't as high as in most other Hindi texts, it's just a little bit sprinkled on top of the mostly normal Hindustani. For example when a character says "fuck" the subtitles render it as धत्त [
dhatt] (well, this isn't uniquely Hindi, but you get the idea) and "
kyo~ faaltuu me~ hame~ confuse kar rahe ho?" is rendered as क्यों फालतू में हमें
भ्रमित कर रहे हो [
kyo~ faaltuu me~ hame~ bhramit kar rahe ho]. This seems like a good way to slowly start getting used to
tatsama words while focusing more on my reading speed in Devanagari, and then later I'll be able to attack monolingual Hindi-Hindi dictionaries (which are chockablock with Sanskritic terms, and they use Sanskritisms to define Persianate words but almost never the other way around).
Netflix also seems to have a fairly good selection of Punjabi films, and I watched a couple of scenes of the Punjabi film
Tiger the other day (I've realised I shouldn't necessarily try and watch things from start to finish, "skimming" through series and movies is enough). Unfortunately the only subtitles are in English, so I won't necessarily be able to use it as "dictionary + flaschard" material, just listening material - I might still record some short scenes (2-5 minutes) and listen to them again and again just to get more exposure to the tones, though.
I'm also starting to fall in love with the diversity of the lexical stock of Indo-Aryan languages. Having to learn both Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic words used to annoy me but now that my general comprehension is pretty high and it's not so hard to pick up new words it's fun to have access to so many different layers of vocabulary.