Discussion Subtitled Audiobooks and Language Learning

Discussion in 'Novel General' started by All The Wrong Novels, Jun 24, 2020.

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  1. All The Wrong Novels

    All The Wrong Novels Well-Known Member

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    Don't know how many people have thought to try this, but this has been how I've been reading books for years. If you know some basics of a language you can get the audiobook in the Original Language, and follow along while reading the translation. This way you can start enjoying literature in the language you're learning earlier, and improve on reading books that only have poor translations or MTL.

    This is also used itself as a kind of language learning strategy called Listening-Reading, which you can read a short description of here. The original way of using the method is pretty hard to set up, as it involves getting a parallel text for a long book or series and trying to re-read it several times in as short a period time as possible going back and forth between the original text and the translation.

    However if you just have a translation and audiobook there's still some benefit from the method, although it may not be super efficient on its own, but its a great way to extend your study time later in the day when you're unable to focus on more traditional study methods. The biggest benefit is helping you consolidate knowledge of stuff you already learned elsewhere, when you see it in the different context of a book you'll remember it more easily and slowly understand it more automatically. You can also pick up new vocabulary just casually reading through, but usually only if its repeated quite heavily throughout the novel, and usually its not as much as you'd pick up doing more deliberate study.

    You can improve the amount of new vocabulary you pick up if you're willing to rewind the audio on sentences that you can partially understand, or where you notice a word is repeated a few times in the translation and you make an effort to pick out which sound it corresponds to. Re-reading chapters also helps, and if you like the book enough to re-read it several times, picking up vocabulary becomes even easier as you become more familiar with the story and the text. Also when you reach the level in your studies where you're ready to start reading without translation, it helps to start reading novels you've read with translation before, as you can guess some unknown words with your memory of the story.

    When I mention this a common objection I hear is that people watch lots of subtitled television without learning a language, so why would audiobooks work any better? The answer is that with audiobooks and a novel, the audio and text are not pre-synchronized for you, so you're forced to constantly listen to the audio to keep your place in the text, while watching television people commonly don't pay attention to audio. Audiobooks also give more continuous exposure to the language, so its easier to notice words that are repeated a lot, and there aren't issues TV sometimes has, where subtitles can be simplified to be read quicker, and long lines may be split up into multiple subtitles, but the subtitles on screen don't always correspond exactly to what's being said at the moment.

    Its also a bit counter-intuitive, but its better to start with longer books rather than short books. Books tend to have their own common terminology, and the longer the book you're in the more you get used to that terminology and the easier it becomes to follow. Also if you re-read a short book too much, eventually you get stuck because some sentences are too difficult, but if you keep reading longer books, you keep finding new sentences that are more at your level, and your comprehension keeps going up, and that makes other sentences easier to learn from. People sometimes call these "i+1" sentences, which are sentences which have only 1 new word in them for you, which are the easiest ones to learn from, though sometimes you can pick things up from more difficult sentences.

    If anyone wants to start learning Mandarin Chinese this way there's a Anki digital flashcard deck called "Spoonfed Chinese" which has 8000 "i+1" sentences, and its a great compliment to this method for getting past the beginner phase more efficiently and building your core vocabulary up.


    Anyways I've probably typed enough for now, but if anyone has any questions I can try to explain more parts of this. I'd also be curious if anyone else had tried something like this.
     
    sakuratemple likes this.
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