TOYOTA Club Belarus

Andrey.by · 18 июн 2011, 17:58

Spaider, thank you so much. I suppose it'll be useful for people who would like to improve their English. Usually I listen some audio cources and audio books during driving to work. But it need some time to download them from the Internet, burn them to CD. I'll try to use your tip and use English learning podcasts over my mobile phone. :beer:

Володька · 18 июн 2011, 20:31

Spaider,thanks a lot! It was very interesting and I hope usefull for me that you have written. I'll try to use your advises.

Well... Guys, I have a question. -) I see most of you know English well but some time your English was bad like my.-) And, maybe at that time you were watching films in English with english subtitles to help you with learning it. I suppose you didn't understand very lots of words and phrases. So my question is did you pause the film at almost every ununderstandable words or phrases to watch them in a vocabulary and try to understand what hero wanted to say? I don't know how I should do, because I understand about 20-25% of the words in the film, and I can (of course, sometimes I can't

) understand the rest of the words by the actions happens in the film.

p.s. ooh! It was very difficult to write it. Please, could you correct my mistakes?

Spaider · 19 июн 2011, 03:06

Володька,
let's consider small errors like typos and let me skip them. However, here are few points:
1. You shouldn't say 'film' in this context. The word film actually means плёнка, you should say movie.
2. Instead of vocabulary I'd rather say dictionary here.

And fuck yeah, you made a good point about watching movies in English.
To me, watching movies with subtitles does not help a lot. Your brain is already busy trying to understand foreign language and it is next to impossible to keep an eye on a plot, translate English and read subtitles at the same time.

Answering your question. Yes, I used to pause the movie to look up some word in dictionary or even rewind a dozen of seconds to repeat scene in doubt. Of course, it can be pain in a ass to do this for a full length movie. That is why I recommend TV series instead for a number of reasons:
- one episode is usually 20-40 minutes long which is significantly shorter that full length movie
- there's a stable set of main characters and you get used to their language very quickly
- if you really like that series you're having fun watching it and do not consider this as unpleasant lesson

My personal choice is 'How I met your mother'. I downloaded series with two tracks: original and Russian translation by Кураж-Бамбей. And because each episode is only 20 minutes long, I usually watch English version from end to end and then in Russian once again. Sometimes, however, I do not even feel I want to see it again in Russian because I picked up almost every word (nah, nice perk, of course, I always miss something). By the way, that guy from Кураж-Бамбей is a good translator in a sense that he is not trying to translate every word literally. He's eager to give the sense of situation or joke. No one's perfect and from time to time he is messes it up and does a bad translation. When you catch him on it you may say to yourself: Damn, I'M GOOD! SO GOOD.

scruoge · 19 июн 2011, 11:16

Spaider писал(а):Володька,
let's consider small errors like typos and let me skip them. However, here are few points:
1. You shouldn't say 'film' in this context. The word film actually means плёнка, you should say movie.
2. Instead of vocabulary I'd rather say dictionary here.

2. Just some explanation: "Vocabulary" - it's talking about human - his "words warehouse" when "dictionary" is the reference of the words with their translation, usually a book.

One more point: You don't say hero about movie character. You can say that person, who saves child from freezing water, risking his own health and life is a hero, but in the movie character, unless you want to emphasize character's heroic actions