Slow-down should surely be helpful...I would think that ideally you want the words-per-minute to approximately correspond to the speeds seen in infant-directed-speech.
I’d generally opt to watch a movie that you’ve seen many times but don’t remember word for word, to prevent translation, so I wouldn’t personally watch the subtitles before reading—but not everyone is me so maybe you should test a few people first?
In terms of subtitles, I’d say fewer words, more high quality is better. The most useful thing I think would be explanations of idioms, expressions, and other things that can’t be understood literally...as well as explanations of un-common words.
For example, if a movie had the line “You’re really gonna hand over the Avatar for a stupid piece of parchment?” then the subtitles would say “parchment—a primitive page made out of animal skin”, since you couldn’t possibly know that from context. (though I suppose one might argue that this type of information is not very important for a speaker starting out)
I’m interested in developing better language learning software.
For the movie case, do you think these would be helpful? Any other ideas?
Read in the subtitles file before viewing, so that vocab can be checked and learned via spaced repetition
Option to slow down the dialogue, with pitch-shifting to keep it from sounding weird and bassy
Slow-down should surely be helpful...I would think that ideally you want the words-per-minute to approximately correspond to the speeds seen in infant-directed-speech.
I’d generally opt to watch a movie that you’ve seen many times but don’t remember word for word, to prevent translation, so I wouldn’t personally watch the subtitles before reading—but not everyone is me so maybe you should test a few people first?
In terms of subtitles, I’d say fewer words, more high quality is better. The most useful thing I think would be explanations of idioms, expressions, and other things that can’t be understood literally...as well as explanations of un-common words.
For example, if a movie had the line “You’re really gonna hand over the Avatar for a stupid piece of parchment?” then the subtitles would say “parchment—a primitive page made out of animal skin”, since you couldn’t possibly know that from context. (though I suppose one might argue that this type of information is not very important for a speaker starting out)