smallwhite wrote:I didn't know that! So her method is very different from yours, then.
Yeah, keep in mind I was an English and French speaker learning Spanish, which is really a double discount! (There's a lot of stuff going on with Spanish verbs that has much more in common with English verbs than with French ones.) And Avatar is an unusually good TV series for this sort of thing: It involves tons of straightforward conversation between kids and teenagers, and almost every episode involves either traveling or meeting people for the first time.
When I tried a harder film like Y Tu Mamá También, then I could still start at the beginning and go through the movie in order, but I had to throw out close to half the cards because they were too hard or irrelevant. And if I were studying a totally unfamiliar language with no "discount" (like Sprachprofi with Japanese), then I'd want to hand-pick the order of my cards, too.
Basically, if you use subs2srs-style cards with Anki, then you can study TV that's 2 or 3 CEFR levels above your "natural" level. So if you just started learning the language yesterday, then you could work with TV that you'd normally use around B1: really easy stuff with clear enunciation and straightforward dialog. If you're around B1, then you could tackle TV that's normally appropriate for a C1 student. (When I was around B1 in French, I spent a lot of time on MC Solaar's faster rap songs, and I still have them stuck in my head a half-decade later.) And so on.
And accurate subtitles are essential. I've tried subs2srs on French films with "approximate" subtitles, and it's maybe only 20% as effective. At the very least, you would want 4 sentences out of every 5 to be exact, and the 5th should at least be close.
So if we want to make a course for total novices, what I suspect we need would be good native audio content that a B1 student might enjoy. Jules Verne audio books would be really more B2ish, I suspect, unless the reader is very slow and clear.
smallwhite wrote:I tried a little bit of Assimil recently for the first time, and I don't get why it's so popular. I think your Subs2SRS would be more fun even if I don't like TV.
For people who like Assimil, I think the experience goes something like this:
- Day 0: "Huh, I don't know this language at all, but somebody said I should try this course."
- Day 1: "Wait, all I have to do is listen to this really slow audio 10 times while looking at the L2 and L1 text? And then I'm done for the day? That's pretty easy, and it only takes about 20 minutes. I can do this."
- Day 15: "This is pretty easy, but I'm not sure I'm learning anything."
- Day 30: "I still don't feel like I'm learning much, but then I looked back at lesson 1, and it was so slow and easy!"
- Day 49: "Wow, the active wave is scary and I start it tomorrow."
- Day 50: "OK, I'm really happy that lesson 1 is so slow and pathetically easy, because I wouldn't have survived the 'active wave version' of it otherwise."
With subs2srs, I can see the progress with each individual card separately:
- The first time I see a card: "This new card is so brutal. I think I listened to it about 15 times before I could follow it, and I'm still only getting about 80%."
- After 4 to 7 days, and maybe 3 reviews: "That's still a hard card, but I think I'm getting a handle on it."
- After 25 to 30 days, and maybe 5 reviews: "Wait, what? That card is so easy. I just listen to it and I understand it. How did I ever think that was hard?"
- After doing no Anki reps for 2 years and ignoring Spanish: "Huh, so about 80% of that card is pretty easy if I listen a couple of times, but I'm not sure about that final 20%." (And after a few hours of reps over a week or two, things come back quickly.)
So this is why I'd love to find a public-domain/Creative Commons graphic novel, like iguanamon suggested, and then find out what it would take to pay an entertaining voice actor to read it (using a speed and enunciation appropriate for B1 students, not total novices, with lots of emotion and personality). If we found the right book, it might actually make an awesome course for total beginners.
But the choice of materials is definitely important.