3 ms·

If you're not a native English speaker, I imagine the video may be preferable to the article.

Yaggo 9y ago
Quite the opposite if you learnt English by reading. Text is so much easier to comprehend, you can easily go back and forward, choose your speed, pause, check definitions (the "Look up" dictionary integration in Safari comes handy), etc due to non-linear nature of reading. Irregular English pronouncing rules don't help either.
rebolek 9y ago
I'm not native English speaker and I always prefer text to video, so I don't have to decipher some strange accent. But other people may have different preferences.
qalmakka 9y ago
As a non-native English speaker, I doubt that. In general listening to English is quite complex for someone that has learnt English only from school; listening to a non native language (especially a quirky spelled one like English) requires quite a bit of excercise to fully understand the various accents and how the words pronounced often illogically associate with those words you've learnt from books. I personally found vastly simpler in the beginning to read text instead of listening to a native speaker talking. That's also why captions in movies help a lot someone learning the language.
- robotmay 9y ago
  I really wish it was easier to find movies in other languages to help learning. I've been half-heartedly trying to learn French the past few years but it's deceptively hard to either find a decent streaming service, or to find torrents with French audio + subtitles. Strangely it was quite easy when I had a stab at Swedish a few years ago; a number of their TV channels have a free streaming service that you can access from anywhere.
  - qalmakka 9y ago
    Maybe you may have more luck using legal services such as Netflix. I'm quite sure they have subtitles for most of the languages they support; at least, I'm sure they have them for English, German and Italian. Torrents are often a poor choice with regards to captions, because either you manage to find a source that ripped them from an source in sync with video (such as the DVD), or you have to resort to fan dubs or that kinds of sort.
    - Nullabillity 9y ago
      For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Here in Sweden you're lucky if there are even the original English subtitles available for the thing you're trying to watch. I've even managed to find a few shows where they didn't even bother to allow disabling the subtitles!
      - Semaphor 9y ago
        > For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Same clusterfuck as with other copyright things. Different companies have the rights to the subtitles and it depends on what terms Netflix got. One of the reasons [0] I mentioned why piracy is still superior even for someone paying and wanting to pay. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517
      - Lunatic666 9y ago
        They don’t. I’m living in Singapore, but have family in Germany and Thailand. If you want to have Thai subtitles in Singapore or Germany, you can create a User with Thai set as the UI language, then you also get offered audio and subtitles in Thai. It’s not documented and totally not intuitive, I only discovered that by accident, but it works very well.
  - hiram112 9y ago
    I used Audible (or just download books on tape from other sources) and listen to it at about 80% speeds. It worked extremely well for German because there are a lot of novels I like and have read in English. Same in Spanish. The good thing about Audible or books on tape, is that you can read along with the exact same text, whereas movies with subtitles are often translated with completely different sentences in an attempt to convey similar meanings from the original language to the translated.
jimmies 9y ago
Before I came to the US, I studied English on my own to be able to program/do computery-stuff because people on the internets always told me to RTFM. On my first TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test for college, I got 29/30 for my reading comprehension and a similarly high score for writing but got 15/30 for speaking and a pretty bad score (not as bad as speaking - don't remember exactly) for listening. Reading and writing were much easier than listening and speaking to me.
- DougWebb 9y ago
  I had the same experience learning French in school as a child. I did really well at reading and writing, but could never understand what the teacher was saying. A couple of years later, in a different school, my classmates were all Hatians that were taking the class for easy credit. I had even more trouble understanding their creole french, and wound up losing all of my comprehension.

Quite the opposite if you learnt English by reading. Text is so much easier to comprehend, you can easily go back and forward, choose your speed, pause, check definitions (the "Look up" dictionary integration in Safari comes handy), etc due to non-linear nature of reading. Irregular English pronouncing rules don't help either.

rebolek 9y ago

I'm not native English speaker and I always prefer text to video, so I don't have to decipher some strange accent. But other people may have different preferences.

qalmakka 9y ago

As a non-native English speaker, I doubt that. In general listening to English is quite complex for someone that has learnt English only from school; listening to a non native language (especially a quirky spelled one like English) requires quite a bit of excercise to fully understand the various accents and how the words pronounced often illogically associate with those words you've learnt from books. I personally found vastly simpler in the beginning to read text instead of listening to a native speaker talking. That's also why captions in movies help a lot someone learning the language.

robotmay 9y ago
I really wish it was easier to find movies in other languages to help learning. I've been half-heartedly trying to learn French the past few years but it's deceptively hard to either find a decent streaming service, or to find torrents with French audio + subtitles. Strangely it was quite easy when I had a stab at Swedish a few years ago; a number of their TV channels have a free streaming service that you can access from anywhere.
- qalmakka 9y ago
  Maybe you may have more luck using legal services such as Netflix. I'm quite sure they have subtitles for most of the languages they support; at least, I'm sure they have them for English, German and Italian. Torrents are often a poor choice with regards to captions, because either you manage to find a source that ripped them from an source in sync with video (such as the DVD), or you have to resort to fan dubs or that kinds of sort.
  - Nullabillity 9y ago
    For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Here in Sweden you're lucky if there are even the original English subtitles available for the thing you're trying to watch. I've even managed to find a few shows where they didn't even bother to allow disabling the subtitles!
    - Semaphor 9y ago
      > For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Same clusterfuck as with other copyright things. Different companies have the rights to the subtitles and it depends on what terms Netflix got. One of the reasons [0] I mentioned why piracy is still superior even for someone paying and wanting to pay. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517
    - Lunatic666 9y ago
      They don’t. I’m living in Singapore, but have family in Germany and Thailand. If you want to have Thai subtitles in Singapore or Germany, you can create a User with Thai set as the UI language, then you also get offered audio and subtitles in Thai. It’s not documented and totally not intuitive, I only discovered that by accident, but it works very well.
- hiram112 9y ago
  I used Audible (or just download books on tape from other sources) and listen to it at about 80% speeds. It worked extremely well for German because there are a lot of novels I like and have read in English. Same in Spanish. The good thing about Audible or books on tape, is that you can read along with the exact same text, whereas movies with subtitles are often translated with completely different sentences in an attempt to convey similar meanings from the original language to the translated.

jimmies 9y ago

Before I came to the US, I studied English on my own to be able to program/do computery-stuff because people on the internets always told me to RTFM. On my first TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test for college, I got 29/30 for my reading comprehension and a similarly high score for writing but got 15/30 for speaking and a pretty bad score (not as bad as speaking - don't remember exactly) for listening. Reading and writing were much easier than listening and speaking to me.

DougWebb 9y ago
I had the same experience learning French in school as a child. I did really well at reading and writing, but could never understand what the teacher was saying. A couple of years later, in a different school, my classmates were all Hatians that were taking the class for easy credit. I had even more trouble understanding their creole french, and wound up losing all of my comprehension.