Films, TV and Entertainment

Story · all 20 words

The Year of Subtitles

I did not learn English from a book. I learned an enormous part of it from a television series about a family of criminals, which I have never quite been able to explain to my mother.

The rule I was given by a teacher, and it is the best advice I have ever been given about listening, was this: watch things dubbed into your own language and you learn nothing at all; watch with Arabic subtitles and you read instead of listening; watch with English subtitles and something slowly begins to happen.

The first month was miserable. I understood perhaps a fifth of an episode, and only because I could see what was happening. I would pause constantly, which ruined every scene, and by the end of forty minutes I was more tired than after a day at work.

What changed things was giving up on understanding everything. I stopped pausing. I let whole conversations go past me and simply followed the plot, and I began to notice that I did not need most of the words – I needed about sixty of them, over and over, and they arrived on their own.

By month four I was watching a season in about ten days. By month seven I caught a joke, in real time, at the same moment as the audience on the recording, and I sat up in my chair like somebody who had won something.

A comedy is the hardest thing, and I would not start there. Jokes are fast, cultural and often depend on one word. A thriller is much easier, because the story carries you and half the dialogue is short. And a documentary is the easiest of all – the narrator speaks clearly, slowly, and in complete sentences, which is a thing almost no real human does.

The other thing that helped, and I still recommend it, is watching a cartoon made for children of about eight. The language is simple, the pictures explain everything, and nobody mumbles.

These days I stream whatever I want and I binge-watch far too much of it. I have opinions about which director I trust and which actor can do anything. I watch a trailer and can tell whether the film will be any good, and I am wrong about half the time.

The series that started all this was based on a novel. I read it two years later, in English, in eleven days, and understood almost all of it – and that was the moment I actually believed I had learned the language, not the certificate.

They released the final episode in December and I watched it slowly, on purpose, over two nights. I still listen to the soundtrack when I am working. My mother now watches it too, dubbed, and tells me the plot as though I have not seen it.