So I was thinking, there are a few main problems (especially if you are a beginner) one runs into, when trying to supplement one's learning Chinese from movies (I'm sure there are more that I'm not aware of, however). Usually, you can't be sure know how good the subtitle translations are, if indeed the movie even has English subtitles. But then, say the English subtitles are reliable, it still might be hard to pair up what you hear in the movie with the English subtitles and make a flashcard (for either words or sentences) of what you don't understand. And especially because Chinese has so many homophones, it is usually very time consuming to try to either search English>Chinese and search for any words that make sense and sound like they did in the movie, or to try to search by pinyin, because if you get the tone wrong, you'll spend a lot of time sifting through words in search of the wrong thing. If you use Chinese subtitles, you have the advantage of knowing that the word you have is indeed the correct word by comparing the characters, but it's still not very easy to look up the words in the first place, and it's still rather time consuming. Probably the best thing would be to use both English and Chinese subtitles at the same time, so you can compare the two, but you'd still want to look up the words that you didn't know in a dictionary to make sure you got the pronunciation (in case you didn't hear it right, or it's hard to understand) and definition (in case the subtitles are not reliable) correct.
But I was thinking, how great would it be, if Pleco made a "Subtitles Reader". This way you wouldn't have to rely on bad English subtitles, or have to worry about mistaking the pronunciation of what someone in the movie said, or have to spend so much time looking up the characters.
Think about it. You could be watching a great movie, come across a word/some words you don't know, pause the movie, select the (Chinese) subtitles you don't understand, find the right definition that fits the situation, create a flashcard, and at the end of the movie, review all of the vocabulary that you didn't know. Then, however much longer, after you were confident that you knew all the vocabulary (or all of the vocabulary you wanted to know, anyways) you could re-watch the movie. Wouldn't that be rewarding?
It would probably be much easier to make it with videos that have the subtitles on a separate text file, but for the videos that have the subtitles inlaid (or not as a separate file that the movie player then "syncs" with the movie) maybe you could use the OCR software.
Anyways, just and idea...What do you think? Is this at all plausible?
But I was thinking, how great would it be, if Pleco made a "Subtitles Reader". This way you wouldn't have to rely on bad English subtitles, or have to worry about mistaking the pronunciation of what someone in the movie said, or have to spend so much time looking up the characters.
Think about it. You could be watching a great movie, come across a word/some words you don't know, pause the movie, select the (Chinese) subtitles you don't understand, find the right definition that fits the situation, create a flashcard, and at the end of the movie, review all of the vocabulary that you didn't know. Then, however much longer, after you were confident that you knew all the vocabulary (or all of the vocabulary you wanted to know, anyways) you could re-watch the movie. Wouldn't that be rewarding?
It would probably be much easier to make it with videos that have the subtitles on a separate text file, but for the videos that have the subtitles inlaid (or not as a separate file that the movie player then "syncs" with the movie) maybe you could use the OCR software.
Anyways, just and idea...What do you think? Is this at all plausible?