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Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

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Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#91

Post by marcelfahle »

jtemplestein wrote: post #34

I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it. There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and…

I did, and still do the same thing. I can't even recall how many times I watched friends, entourage or deadwood. (I'm a Kraut, too, by the way). It helps massively, especially with slang. I want to do the same thing now for spanish.

Edit: Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#92

Post by lotharbot »

Dewie wrote: post #83
jcampbell1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather th…

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough…

> "what is it like to have no accent?"

This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#96

Post by polymatter »

zht wrote: post #81
polymatter wrote: post #17

Please don't use flags for disambiguating languages. ( http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-repres... ) is a starting point. Basically - some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India) - some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country) - you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wron…

but in this case it's about the written language and less about verbal dialects. Chinese and Cantonese are representable by the same written language.

Sorry, no.

> "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences" from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese).

Fluent and literate Cantonese are not automatically fluent and literate in Mandarin. In the same way fluent and native English speakers are not automatically fluent and literate in German, despite using the same alphabet and sharing some vocabulary and grammar.

Re: Show HN: Learn English with movies and TV Shows

#99

Post by mtrimpe »

duwip wrote: post #55
mtrimpe wrote: post #53

Please, pretty please with sugar on top, also add the ability to delay the subtitles! From listening to a lot of Pimsleur I know that, for me, anticipation and correction is one of the most powerful ways to learn a language. I'm pretty sure that listening to a dialog, trying to work out what is said and being corrected a few seconds later by the actual translation would have an amazing impact on a lot of people (alth…

If you click the subtitles settings button, you'll see there's a tab for that. You can also dynamically change your subs selection, in case you're unhappy with the subs fleex auto-selected for you.

Cool! Can I sign up to be notified about the Mac version being released? It's HN username at gmail.
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