Do you guys prefer to Lingq and learn the entire netflix show first, even if it will spoil the show? Or do you prefer to Lingq the show after watching it even if you may not understand everything?
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For me, it is absolutely ābeforeā. It makes no sense to watch a movie if you hardly understand anything. Therefore, I find it better to understand a few words and the general context beforehand. After that, the film is much more digestible and less frustrating. But I do it in several bites. Reading the text of a whole movie beforehand is too much and quickly becomes boring.
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For me it is āafterā. So you can enjoy the show without spoilers and work on the details later. If, after watching the show, you realize that you do not like it very much you should skip LingQing this show and watch another one. Of course, it depends on your language skills in the target language. If you hardly understand anything, it does not make sense to watch a show without working on the vocabulary before. In this case, however, I would recommend to use easier learning materials and switch to Netflix later.
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Read a transcript without knowing who is saying what and where the action is taking place makes no sense for me. You also can go to the lesson before watching the series/movie just to ācleanā it, e.t. changing the status to known for blue and yellow words you immediately understand and ignore non-words like exclamations and proper names. For that you donāt have to read the transcript. If youāre really uncertain about understanding even the gist of the story, Iād rather advise you to read a short review or summary (more spoilers of course) beforehand. After having watched you movie or series the lesson will look a lot less frightening thanks to the prior work. You can now focus on the new sentences and words. For long movies I would recommend first just to focus on scenes where you have a lot of talking. Just go into the text document and look for some key words. Now you can create smaller lessons based on the movie transcript. For instance, if I learned English with the classic Heat (1995) I would draw out the infamous coffee talk between Al Pacino and DeNiro first and spare me lots of the muter parts.
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I think it is personal preference and where you are at in your learning that will determine what you are more comfortable doing. LingQ did not have this capability under fairly late in my learning when I was already watching Netflix and could largely understand everything. I was really just watching and reading the subtitles to improve my listening comprehension. When the Netflix import feature came out, I never read the transcripts of the show ever. I just dumped the words and cleared, linqed, and more them to known. It gave me more accurate stats, looked up the words I didnāt know, etc.
Personally, I think reading first is generally the way to go in most situations. You canāt know what you are listening to (or watching) until you know the words, and you canāt know the words until you read them in LingQ. Iām not sure if I would even bother watching unless I was far enough along in my learning.
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Personally, I would probably watch the movie with something like Language Reactor first. That way I can get at the moment translations, while still enjoying the movie. I can pause after each sentence without a feeling of too much disruption. Then I would import into LingQ and either skim through and add all the blue words and maybe review the sentences with yellow words. I would likely not read the whole thing again.
If itās a documentary, I might just watch it with subtitles and then import into LingQ and do my normal full read and Lingqāing. Watching with the subtitles is dependent on your level and how much you can keep up. I find documentaries to be easier as the speech. WIth movies itās sometimes difficult to discern the spoken words and a lot of times slang is used which may be hard to figure out. Furthermore, at least for German, but Iāve heard for other languages, the subtitles are typically not what the actors or actresses are actually saying. In the end though, presumably itās correct language for the target language so all good for reading.
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I donāt read the Netflix transcript imported into LingQ. I either just listen without subtitles and add listening statistics to LingQ or use Language Reactor.
The issue with using Language Reactor is:
- I donāt have my own, customised definitions from the LingQ database (which are better than the Language Reactor ones)
- New Words are not highlighted, because itās not connected to the LingQ database
- I have to import the episode into LingQ later to add 1x read, and mark the Known Words and add some common lingQs (do not lingQ every word! Itās a waste of time). This is quite tedious. Even without the bug that you canāt mark words as Known from the Vocabulary section of a lesson on Android, itās still tedious.
It would be easier, if I didnāt have to import the text to add 1x read, mark the Known Words and common lingQs, but gotta keep those stats, right? I sometimes do this for harder TV shows, but generally, I just prefer to just use Netflix as listening practice.
I generally think about it that I learn most of my new vocabulary from reading, where I can look the word up in the dictionary, and Iām solidifying those words and phrases into my subconscious by listening. I consider watching Netflix to be predominately āsolidifyingā (and entertainment) time. This is why I only started watching Netflix at around 10k Known Words in Italian. Before that there wasnāt much vocabulary to solidify.
In Italian there are lots of dubbed series. Watching a dubbed series in Italian, whether it be anime or an American TV series, the subtitles are vastly different to the dub. Therefore, this makes reading the subtitles and listening to the audio extremely confusing. For this reason, I do not use Language Reactor on any dubbed show. I only use it on native Italian content, where itās much more likely that the subtitles and the audio will generally line up.
If I want to use LingQ to study challenging content and do more active study, I prefer to import from YouTube. The subtitles and the audio nearly always line up, because Iām importing native Italian content. Furthermore, I can download the audio to my phone, where I can relisten it during my chores.
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I think it depends on your levelā¦ When youāre like a1-b1.1 it might feel useless watching a movie and just hearing jibberish. In that case itād help to first do the lesson in Lingq and then watch the movie. Currently, Iām B1.2 Bulgarian (I thinkā:sweat_smile:) and Iām watching Avatar (the real one not the one with the blue creatures) and I understand about 70-80%, which allows me to fill in the gaps with the help of context. In this case I prefer to first watch an episode completely without subtitles and then do the lesson in Lingq. Plus, it feels good to watch a serie without subtitles. I donāt know why, but it does. 
haha
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I first watch an episode with splitscreen On one side netflix the other lingq.
Going through the subtitles and watching the movie mainly to know the context, of what I am hearing while reading the subtitles.
After that Iāll listen to the episode will doing simple tasks like commuting. This is so enjoyable because I already know the scenes and while I donāt know that many words I still understand what they are saying.
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mainly for reading practice, but recently i took a show i know in english and imported the subtitles in TL, using that to study. I feel like trying things forwards and backwards does good things for studying, at least for me.
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With the bugs on both the browser and on Android with regard to the in-lesson Vocabulary > New Words (which make them unusable), Iāve recently been having to manually go through every Netflix transcript one page at a time to mark words as Known. There are several things worth noting after doing this with quite a lot of transcipts recently:
- After imported from Netflix, I donāt read the whole transcript word-for-word, but rather just quickly skip through pages looking for yellow words and blue words. I then change their levels or mark them as Known accordingly. I also mark lingQs for words, which I think are common enough that Iāll see again in my LingQ life.
- As Iām scanning, I partially look for phrases (that is, groups of words that Iāve seen often together or alternatively words which look like a phrase, such with a strange literal meaning, etc.). This is not possible to do in the in-lesson Vocabulary > New Words section.
- Probably the most noteworthy thing is that it takes much, much longer than just opening up a lesson and going to the in-lesson Vocabulary > New Words and marking as Known.
At my current level in Italian (almost Intermediate 2), I can watch Italian movies with subtitles with ease and, despite not knowing every single word, understand the entire storyline, at least most of the time. As Iāve already read the transcript once (as subtitles of the TV series/movie), at my current level, it doesnāt interest me too much to read it again and I find it boring. Even though I learn new words and keep my stats as up-to-date as I can doing this, it just takes too much time and itās kinda boring.
Thatās my experience. But, as I mentioned, it might depend on your level. If your level is lower, perhaps re-reading the transcript or reading it first may be more interesting and beneficial for you.
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I just put up the subtitles in the language. That being said this is for Portugues and not Japanese or Korean and then that might be a different matter entirely. I am far enough along my vocabulary is not perfect but generally enough I can follow along here and there.
edit: This being said Portugues is spoken so quickly that while I know the words its easier to follow along with the subtitles until Iām up to speed on listening to it. Maybe I am at the point of needing to do much more output in speaking to adapt to catch up and follow along.
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What has worked for me is watching a scene from a show and then reading the transcript for that specific scene on LingQ before rewatching the scene and then continuing onto the next scene to repeat the process. I find that this is a good way of assessing my listening comprehension in small chunks at a time. I will then learn the vocab with the SRS function on this website a few days later.
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