this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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I have the DVDs of The Orphans of Simitra in which the only easily-found soft subtitles are in Arabic. I thought I can get the gist of the show by reading the source material (book) first then watch the show without subs.

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[–] missingno@fedia.io 29 points 3 days ago (7 children)

No amount of just passively watching anime will teach you a language, especially when you're just reading subtitles in your own language. Your brain is not paying attention to the target language, you're just paying attention to your native language.

To actually start learning, you need to do real study. Textbooks, lessons, spaced repetition, graded readers, etc.

Once you've learned a good amount of vocab and at least a little bit of grammar, you'll have to take the plunge into immersing yourself in native content.

But here's the catch: you will not be comfortable the first time you try to watch something without subtitles. If you keep putting this step off until you think you're ready, you'll never actually be ready.

The first time you start immersing, you're barely going to pick out a few vocab words, but you're not going to parse a full sentence, let alone follow along with the story. And it's going to feel overwhelming and frustrating.

But that's the grind you gotta push through. Little by little, the bits and pieces you pick out will add up. Ideally you should even be taking notes as you do it, looking up new words and making flashcards. Immersion learning is homework, and you have to really work at it. The trick is that you're not just watching passively, you're studying actively.

You'll never get to a level where you'll feel comfortable until you've spent a lot of time feeling uncomfortable first.

[–] neshura@bookwyr.me 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think a great way to learn language (past a certain initial learning step) is music, it's usually short with repetitive phrases and people usually listen to a piece of music a lot initially before it goes into the regular playlist, which allows one to train both vocab and listening comprehension at the same time.

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 5 points 3 days ago

The problem is, music lyrics in many languages aren't always representative of how the language is actually spoken—you can get tortured grammar or pronunciation and strange vocabulary that the artist chose to make a point—and depending on the type of music, it may be difficult to make out the words at all. That doesn't mean it's useless, but you have to be somewhat cautious with it.

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