When I was in high school, our english teacher always wanted us to watch tv shows with english subtitles because that would have helped us a lot in learning the language and I think he was right.
However, with Chinese is not always that easy to find subtitles so sometimes I have to watch Chinese films/series either with english subtitles or with no subtitles at all.
When you watch movies/tv series in your target language, do you usually watch it with subtitles in your native language, target language or you don’t use subtitles at all?
For English TV shows I use English subtitles, sometimes the characters speak really fast or use slang I don’t understand so I like to have this ‘support’.
For the Chinese films/series I watch on Netflix I use Language Reactor to have English/Chinese/Pinyin at the same time. The tool also allows to check sentence examples for each word you highlight, and we can even ‘save’ words in a list.
Personally, I like to watch videos without subtitles for the first time, as it helps me focus on the language and pick up new words and phrases. However, I find that watching the video a second time with subtitles helps me to understand all the meaning that I might have missed the first time around.
I think if you have subtitles on it turns into reading practice rather than listening practice. Reading is very helpful and important but I try to get my reading practice from books. However, if I weren’t going to read books I’d probably do a mixture of subtitles and no subtitles.
