Not much of an update. I've been binge watching Star Trek in Italian for what seems like ages. After I discovered how to watch with Italian subs as well as audio I've been doing nothing but. I confess however on some really sticky difficult dialogue I rewind and switch to english subtitles to make sure I've understood. The good thing is these little digressions into English show that I've almost always understood correctly what was going on, although in a more vague way. I hesitate to use percentages, but I might have understood 70% before my little English digression.
So, after two months or so of watching all Italian Star Trek, I flipped over to watch Carabinieri which is a TV show I've no sub-titles for but have watched before. I remember watching all 7 seasons for the first super challenge and I started out not understanding anything! I watched a couple of episodes and I feel that I understand it all. Of course this isn't like English where I understand every word and every nuance of the expressions used. But I understand the plot and could easily explain it to someone else.
This shows me watching native content even 7 seasons of it without any real understanding is a waste. What I mean is that like when you read a book in another language you need to understand more than 90% of the words on a page before you're going to be able to flow along with reading. Like reading you need to gain some understanding (i+1 sort of thing) before watching will really be comprehensible.
A lot of Italian has passed under the bridge since I started that first SC, and I figure I wasn't much better than A2 then so difficult native content was mostly passing me by. I think watching a dubbed series which I've seen before (Star Trek), with audio and sub-titles has solidified the language in my brain enough to allow fast flowing native Italian to be processed and understood. So while watching Carabinieri I was able to pick out some words and think; Oh, I don't know that word I need to look it up. Whereas before it was all just a blur of sounds which didn't appear to have breaks between words! Before I was thinking; Oh, I think I know that word.
What a difference it makes the change from "I think I can identify a word I recognise" to "Oh, I need to look that word up because I don't know it". It means there was a ton of words which I did understand. Another interesting little thing for me was the fact that the words I didn't know, I had a good idea how to spell when I looked them up, and I could pronounce it well enough that Google translate understood what I was saying.
For my talk in Bratislava I'm giving a talk on using TV to help learn a language. (physician heal thyself?) I've more or less come to the conclusion that for someone who is in the A1-A2 range it is probably a waste of time to binge watch TV. But from B1+ it is better than anything else you could probably do. I've also decided that for someone A1-A2 TV with Anki is probably one of the better ways to get to B1+ in the first place.
I've looked at emk's experiment with Spanish and seriously considered doing something similar myself. I did start doing this with Finnish, but failed to do the supplementary exercises like studying grammar, etc. Mostly though being too lazy quickly shot that idea down. But I did think I'd like to experiment on others... bwahhahahhaha!
I was thinking if I could get 5-11 people (I must point out I did a hour long diversion in looking at numbers required for statistical significance) and a corresponding set of people for a control group. I could do a program where I teach French to people only using Anki & TV, followed by binge watching TV against the control group who do night classes or something. Then test them at the end.