looking for input on extensive video watching

[lavengro]

I am keen on having input from the collective brain trust here as to the best way to use target language video, possibly dissuading me from my present doubts.

I have recently, and reluctantly, begun watching Peppa Pig episodes on the YouTube in aid of learning my target language. I thought this would be a great match for me, as I love animals, pretty much all animals, except for two classes: 1) anything with eight legs, and 2) anything actively in the process of trying to attack or eat me. I even really like and respect pigs, an underappreciated animal.

But quite honestly, only an hour or so into Peppa Pig, I have to say there is an entire cartoon family of impossibly chipper pigs that are in jeopardy of getting virtually strangled by me. So, I am trying to make this experiment as little painful for me as possible. And nope, I am not going to switch to something I like more, just out of plain stubbornness.

Should I, in the view of those who have engaged successfully in this sort of thing, be watching with audio in the target language with subtitles in the target language, in English subtitles, or with no subtitles at all. At present, I use Italian subtitles, I pause when I encounter a word I do not know, a phrase I have not encountered before or just something of interest, look it up, write it down, etc. Sort of the video equivalent of intensive reading.

Should I just be putting the pen/paper/wordreference.com/my doubts down and simply watch cartoon animals doing random things while communicating in a combination of some odd moon language I do not understand plus occasional snorts in the hopes that it will at some point sink in? And if so, what sort of time frame may be involved?

[Lawyer&Mom]

No subtitles at all.

But why on earth Peppa Pig? Postman Pat is way more enjoyable!

But seriously, I think you should watch a grown-up dubbed show that you actually enjoy. After the first season or two I promise you will be much, much better at watching Italian.

I did this with French. After Assimil I watched two seasons of a French noir mystery, Witnesses, which I understood not a lot, a season of House of Cards, also not a lot, followed by seven seasons of ER. My comprehension was vastly improved by the end of the first season of ER, which was maybe 40 hours into extensive listening? 40 hours is totally doable! I’m at about 150 hours now, and my comprehension is amazingly okay.

I’ve read elsewhere on the forum that 100 hours of extensive TV is the magic number, and I don’t disagree.

[reineke]

That sounds like intensive work. If you want simple sentences + translation and explanations I'd recommend an English-based grammar and a bilingual reader. Nocchi's Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana was written entirely in Italian. If you want to listen extensively as recommended by the experts, watch something interesting and comprehensible. Mehehe

[StringerBell]

When I started with Italian, I wanted to focus on conversational Italian, so I decided to watch a show that would have the kind of dialogue that would be most useful for this. Since I have Netflix, I watched 8 seasons of That 70's Show (200 episodes) with Italian audio. There were no Italian subs (Italian subs never match up with the audio anyway, so I learned not to use them). My strategy was:

1) watch the show with Italian audio and English subs (to understand the meaning of what characters were saying).
2) watch the same show a second time in Italian but with no audio.

When I noticed certain words or phrases repeatedly used, I tried to write them down and ask about them. Sometimes I wrote notes about words I thought were particularly interesting or useful. Without the subs, I wasn't always able to write things down correctly, so I usually made a note of the timestamp so that I could show it to a native speaker later for an explanation. If I wasn't in the mood, I didn't write anything down.

The benefit of sticking with one show for a lot of episodes is that vocabulary tends to repeat so if you're patient and consistent, it's almost impossible to not learn a lot of new words without having to intentionally trying to memorize them.

I would say that the first 2 seasons were a real struggle, but soon after that it started getting exponentially easier. The last 3 or 4 seasons my comprehension was good enough that I didn't really need the English subs anymore.

[lavengro]

Thanks Lawyer&Mom, reineke and StringerBell for the comments, appreciated and I will give them some thought and perhaps a try. I took a quick look at "Il Postino Pat" just now L&M and frankly found the awkward movement due to lack of functioning knees too distracting to focus on the language, although there was considerable less snorting than with Peppa Pig.

[Flickserve]

No subtitles at all.

But why on earth Peppa Pig? Postman Pat is way more enjoyable!

But seriously, I think you should watch a grown-up dubbed show that you actually enjoy. After the first season or two I promise you will be much, much better at watching Italian.

I did this with French. After Assimil I watched two seasons of a French noir mystery, Witnesses, which I understood not a lot, a season of House of Cards, also not a lot, followed by seven seasons of ER. My comprehension was vastly improved by the end of the first season of ER, which was maybe 40 hours into extensive listening? 40 hours is totally doable! I’m at about 150 hours now, and my comprehension is amazingly okay.

I’ve read elsewhere on the forum that 100 hours of extensive TV is the magic number, and I don’t disagree.

Do you think different people assimilate it differently?

I was immersed in Cantonese for a three months at work and socially but can't say I really picked up much comprehension. I would have attained roughly 600+ hours over the three months before going on to take one on one lessons.

[Lawyer&Mom]

No subtitles at all.

But why on earth Peppa Pig? Postman Pat is way more enjoyable!

But seriously, I think you should watch a grown-up dubbed show that you actually enjoy. After the first season or two I promise you will be much, much better at watching Italian.

I did this with French. After Assimil I watched two seasons of a French noir mystery, Witnesses, which I understood not a lot, a season of House of Cards, also not a lot, followed by seven seasons of ER. My comprehension was vastly improved by the end of the first season of ER, which was maybe 40 hours into extensive listening? 40 hours is totally doable! I’m at about 150 hours now, and my comprehension is amazingly okay.

I’ve read elsewhere on the forum that 100 hours of extensive TV is the magic number, and I don’t disagree.

Do you think different people assimilate it differently?

I was immersed in Cantonese for a three months at work and socially but can't say I really picked up much comprehension. I would have attained roughly 600+ hours over the three months before going on to take one on one lessons.

French and Cantonese are apples and oranges. French is a very transparent language for an English speaker. Given the vocabulary overlap, you are never really a complete beginner. And I had completed Assimil before I started extensive TV. And French isn’t my first language. It helps to know that it listening is always hard at first, and you just have to push through.

The closest I’ve come to extensive TV with a non-transparent language was three seasons of Srugim that I watched *with English subtitles* and at the end I could say “Yes”, “No,” “Please” and “Thank You” in Hebrew... So don’t fee bad if you didn’t pick up much Cantonese. You need to understand *something* of what you are watching to make progress!

[Flickserve]

Thanks. Good to know.

I also found Peppa Pig excruciating.

[白田龍]

Peepa has too litle vocabulary and too little dialgue. Your brain can handle a lot more than that.

I surely jump straight into animations for older ages and tv series dubbed into my target language. If available I would probably use TL subtitles for a week or two, then disable it for good.

[reineke]

This is all idle advice at its worst. These discussions end up in talk about personal media preferences and current TV favorites until someone swings by and trash talks extensive listening.

If the OP can't understand Peppa how can it be too easy for him? Why on earth would you recommend something even harder? No one checked lavengro's current level although we can imply that it's pretty low.

Peppa is 21.5 hours long and is almost 100 pct dialogue. The English transcripts contain around 5000 unique words. Around 25 pct of this vocabulary belongs to the A1 curriculum. The expressions, collocations and multiword vocabulary chunks can be described as very useful.

Today I listened to around 2 hrs of Peppa in French just for you guys. The episodes are around 5 minutes long. It was non-stop talk and I didn't hear a single French word I would feel comfortable not knowing.

I also listened to it in Japanese. It was very motivating being able to understand mini-scenes and some individual expressions even with my almost non-existent vocabulary.

Obviously, if you can't stand it don't watch it. Kipper is even easier. I couldn't find it on YouTube for you in Italian but if you look around you will find other shows. Adult shows will also have a lot of simple sentences but you may have to go through 40 minutes of such material to get the equivalent of 5 minutes of Peppa. If you want to pick up a language it's best to watch a variety of material including live TV and commercials. That should provide sufficient variety and simple learning opportunities. I don't see that happening here.

This learner completed Assimil Italian. He studied additional vocabulary (1100 Anki cards) and in the second month of his learning effort he started listening to anything in Italian he thought would be beneficial. He also found that at this point Peppa suited him perfectly. After completing 95 lessons of Assimil, additional vocabulary study, and 60 days of listening he reported being able to understand around 90 pct of Peppa.

This sounds like a credible learning plan with a good chance of success.

Any simple content should help you with that initial push. A lot of learners know this instinctively.

You could try something similar or you can spend time on language forums discussing animated animals.

"Today I completed my 90th straight day of learning my first second language. Here's what I've learned so far...

The Initial Plan

Assimil Italian - One lesson a day at a minimum. Listen to the lesson as often as possible and read the lesson as often as possible in that given day.

Anki - Enter all sentences from Assimil into Anki to review daily. There would be no translations in the Anki deck. Just the sentence in Italian.

The First 625 Words - Using a frequency list from Fluent Forever I would enter each word into an Anki deck. Again, I would use no translations. The front of the card would be the word in Italian with a pronunciation of the word from Forvo.com and the back of the card would be a picture of what the word meant. I would create all of the Anki cards myself.

Listen - I would listen to anything in my target language that I thought would be beneficial.

The Execution of the Plan

The first 30 days were very easy for me. I was entering 30 new words a day into Anki from the frequency list. I was going through the Assimil program daily and really enjoying it. I was entering the sentences from Assimil into Anki and reviewing them daily.

In the second month I began to watch videos in my target language. My preferred videos to watch were Peppa Pig on youtube. The content of the videos is aimed towards very small children and it seemed to fit perfectly for me.

An interesting thing happened at this time (and it continues to happen now). Sometimes while watching a video, I am understanding about 95% of what's being said. I'm not even thinking about it. It's just making sense in my brain.

But other times, it seems like I don't understand one word of Italian and nothing is making sense. It's very strange and can be demotivating...

At times during the second month I would try to put on Italian talk radio or watch some kind of video of adults talking in Italian. I just wasn't there yet in terms of my learning so I decided to go back to the stuff that was at least making a little sense to me. I could pick out a lot of words being spoken on talk radio but they were just words. They didn't form into a cohesive idea in my head.

This last month I have changed things a bit. The reason for this was boredom. I was afraid that the boredom would turn into frustration and I'd again suffer from the same problem that made me quit before..

I also briefly tried reading some Italian newspapers online as well as a few Italian books. This was simply too frustrating for me so I stopped doing it very quickly.

The Results

I finished the 95th lesson of Assimil today. I have 1,138 cards in my "Parole Italiane" (Italian Words) Anki deck. I have written out 45 Assimil lesson translations in a Word document with all of my mistakes put in bold letters. I've watched hours of Italian cartoons and hours of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Italian. And with all of that, I don't think I could accurately grade where exactly I am at in terms of my Italian nor do I want to. The only definitive thing I can say at this point is that I'm way beyond what I knew 90 days ago. At this point I can understand approximately 90% of everything said in any given random Peppa Pig cartoon and I had no expectations of that happening when I started.

In terms of output of the language this is much more difficult. The only output I got from this plan was from Assimil's "second wave" where you translate English into Italian. I made a lot of mistakes and some of the sentences I wasn't able to translate very well at all. But that's okay. I never expected to be able to write in perfect Italian after 90 days.

The amazing thing for me about the results of these past 90 days is that I rarely realized when I was making progress. There is, however, one particular thing that keeps happening that makes me realize I am learning a lot. In fact, the grammatical thing that made me quit Duolingo due to frustration is now like second nature to me. And so I've learned a very obvious but very important lesson - Things that were once hard will become easier.

I can't tell you why, how, or when it happened but it happened for me. In fact, it happened in a lot of aspects of the language."

https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ht_day_of/