tips for hiding hard-coded subs

This post marks the completion of my sixth viewing of the above-pictured drama (雍正王朝). This was the first Chinese TV series drama that I bought. I purchased it on 11/18/2008 which was 4 months ago. I have watched it 6 times already because I did not have very many dramas. Since then, I have watched 3 other Chinese dramas and I have 2 new ones that I will be watching next. Not only that, but I have 4 more on the way from Amazon China. From here on out, I won't need to watch each drama so frequently.

The first three dramas that I bought have hard subs in Japanese. I have tried to avoid catching any glimpse of the subtitles. This time around, I found two ways in which I can effectively hide them. However, it also means hiding that part of the screen as well.

The first way to hide them is to not play the drama in full screen on the computer. Take another window, like the finder window, and cover up the bottom of the screen where the subtitles appear. This will be about the lower 1/4 or 1/5 of the screen. So the DVD player application is not the front window.

The second way applies to my Portable Language Acquisition Input Device (PLAID). On my portable DVD player I can zoom the screen to 2x. Then I can slide the screen down so that I see all of the top. This is just enough to hide the bottom portion where the subtitles appear. Of course the video becomes a little pixelated with the zoom and the right and left edges of the picture also get cut off.

My 2 new Chinese TV dramas that I will be watching next also have hard subs, but there are two differences. The first is that the subs are in Chinese, the same language as the audio. The second difference is that the subs are not actually on the picture. The picture is letterboxed with the subtitles appearing below the video. So if I use method 1 to hide the subtitles, I won't be missing any of the picture. Also, it will be easier to not see the subtitles when they are not directly on the picture anyway.

Even though the new dramas will have Chinese subtitles, I think it is better for me to not be looking at them now. Later, after I have acquired listening and speaking and want to focus on reading, I can use the Chinese subtitles to learn to read, I think.

I'm looking forward to watching all of the new dramas that are coming. I believe that in each drama series, there will be certain words which appear more often than in other series. For example, in this drama, from the very first time through it, I learned the word for "emperor" because the emperor is the main character that the whole story revolves around. In the second and third dramas, that word was also used quite a bit. In the fourth drama, that word is used just a few times and because I knew the word I knew exactly who they were talking about the first time it was spoken in the drama. In that fourth drama, the emperor doesn't appear until near the end. The emperor is just a small part in that series. But from that drama, I learned the word for "kill." People kept saying, "I'm going to kill you!" I had noticed the word previously, but I didn't know if it only meant "stab." But then when someone was killed by a gun, I knew that it was not a word used only with swords and knives.

So I do think it is best to get a wide variety of exposure to your target language. You don't have to guess at what every word means. Somewhere, there is a situation that will make it patently obvious what a certain word means.

雍正王朝 5

I finished my 5th viewing of 雍正王朝, a Chinese drama in Mandarin. This time took 9 days to complete the 30 hours. It feels like I've watched it 20 times already. There are still some characters whose names I don't know that I feel like I should know by now. I guess they do not appear as frequently as the ones whose names I do know, and they are probably not addressed by name as often.

I have stated before, my intention to not think about the words I hear and to try not to figure out the meaning or wonder about the meaning of the words. It is actually very difficult to do that. I find myself trying to figure out the meanings quite often. But there are a few words that I know I am not going to try to figure out what they mean. For example, when someone enters the room, kneels and greets the king. I often hear this same greeting. Well I know that it is a greeting. I can see what is going on. It doesn't really matter what the words mean. I just know that when they come in and do this and say that, it's the kind of greeting they use for the king. That's all I need to know.

All these other words that I had studied before starting the TV method, the words that I could translate, I tend to do just that. I'm trying not to, but when there is a pause, I can hear my mind translating. I wish I hadn't studied Chinese. Not even a little bit. For words I have never looked up, I don't automatically translate them. Translations are like an anchor. They slow you down. When you hear a word and you translate it, that's like throwing an anchor overboard. It's easier to throw the anchor overboard than to bring it back up. If you're throwing dozens of anchors overboard while listening, you're never going to be able to keep up.

Just listening attentively, but not thinking and analyzing is difficult to do. It's very difficult to control yourself. Just try listening to Steve Kaufmann talk about how long it takes to become fluent in a language and see if you can sit there and listen without agreeing or disagreeing with what he says. Can you just listen and not react to what he says? Or are you always coming up with something in your head? I find myself disagreeing with a lot of points he makes. When he says something I don't agree with, I think of exceptions or reasons why he is wrong. Even when I tried to stop doing that and just listen, I couldn't!

I studied French in High School. Since French word order is so similar to English, if I translate all of the words as I read a sentence, I can understand what it means. If I just read the sentence and don't translate anything, I don't know what it means. It's exactly like the example Jerry Dai gave.

So I definitely feel that translation is a bad bad thing. Looking up words in a bilingual dictionary is bad. Flashcards are bad. Textbooks are bad. Teachers who speak your language are bad. Study is bad. Being in a hurry is bad. It's all bad bad bad. Speaking early is definitely bad. Slowly spoken language learning material is bad. Grammar is bad.

雍正王朝 4

After 13 days, I have finally finished watching 雍正王朝 for the 4th time. I don't know if there was any improvement this time through. But that doesn't mean there wasn't. It's easy to notice an improvement when you go from 1% understanding to 2% understanding because you've doubled your comprehension. Then with the more you know, a one percent improvement isn't going to be noticeable. Plus, it's hard to feel an improvement when that other drama I watch is so much easier to understand.

Perhaps I'll watch a movie in Chinese before I start watching the other drama. I still need to place an order for a new drama.

I've added a display of the number of hours I have put into the TV method. It is visible on the right side of the blog page. Looking at it now, you can see I've put in 223 hours. I can only imagine what a big difference another 200 hours will make. And another 200 after that. The number of hours I have now seems so small. It's like I haven't even done anything yet.

雍正王朝 3

I just finished watching 雍正王朝 at 10:33 PM. This is the 3rd time I have watched this Chinese drama series. There are 44 episodes on 9 discs. The first 8 discs contain 5 episodes each. I watched the first disc on Wednesday. Then 2 discs on each day Thursday and Friday. Then I had a 51 hour break. I resumed watching on Sunday night into Monday morning. I watched 2 discs then and then today I watched the last 2 discs. So it took me 7 days to complete it including a 2 day break.

This time around, I had the advantage of already having watched 2 other drama series and I noticed that the words I picked up from those 2 dramas showed up in this drama quite often as well. I hadn't been able to notice those words from my first 2 viewings of this series. This illustrates the value of multiple sources of input. The meaning of certain words may be better illustrated in another drama or TV show than the one you are currently viewing. And then when you go back to watching what you have already seen before, you are able to understand it better.

The more I watch the same series, the better I am able to learn the characters names or titles. In a previous post, I illustrated a point about the learning process by using the example of a piece of fruit. First you may think a word means apple but then you find that the word is also applied to a banana and so you adjust your understanding of that word. This exact thing has already happened to me. In the 2nd drama series, I thought the name of a character was a certain 3 words. Then later, I noticed that the last 2 words were applied to another person and so I realized it was a title. Based on the rank of those two people, I thought the word meant 'princess.' Then in one of the other dramas, I saw the same title being applied to a man who was a son of the emperor so I realized that it was not just for females like the word 'princess.' I thought it could mean prince or princess. And then I see the title still being used to address this man even after he became emperor. So again I adjusted my understanding of this word.

You see, without knowing the exact translation of this word, I have to learn to disregard such translations. In fact, I don't need them. Why would I need a translation? I have experienced how this word is used and to whom it is applied. I have an understanding that works for me and one in which I can adjust as needed. I don't need to be tied to translations. I know from my studies of Japanese that words do not have a one-to-one relationship between languages. So I know it is important to understand the word and not to just know a translation.

So, yes, definitely my understanding has increased. While my new understanding increases little by little, my old understanding gets reinforced. My listening ability also improves each time. I am not yet able to concentrate on everything I hear. Sometimes I get caught thinking about a word I just heard and then miss the next thing being said. But even so, I enjoy my small gains. Over time, it will add up to big gains. In my next post I want to discuss why small gains are good.

雍正王朝 2

This morning, on the train home from work, I watched the last episode of the Chinese drama. That completes the second viewing of my first Chinese drama. It looks like it took me 3 weeks for this second round. That's about 3 times as long as the first viewing. I guess some days I was a little busy and some days I didn't feel like watching as much.

I just now discovered their is a discrepancy. The packaging says it is 2200 minutes, but 45 minutes X 44 episodes is only 1980 minutes. Only if the episodes were 50 minutes each would it make 2200 minutes. I wonder if there are some bonus episodes hidden on the disc somewhere.

Well then it only takes 33 hours to view the whole series and so that averages to about 11 hours a week for this second viewing. That's too few hours so I'm disappointed in myself. I want to spend 20 or more hours a week. With my new language acquisition device, I'll make that happen.

When I started on the second viewing, I noticed right away that I was hearing some sentences that I hadn't heard the first time. There was no huge improvement, but just a few here and there. I noticed that there is more that I could have understood the first time around if my brain had been in tune with the language because I had already studied those words but I'm just not processing them automatically. That's when I realized that my brain is being slowly tuned to the language.

When you think about it, this is an important step that any language learner must go through. Most learners do lots of studying and learning before they ever tune in to the language. They may know a vast amount of words and grammar, but the first time they encounter the language in a natural setting, they complain that their hearing is not good. The words and sentences fly right past them and they can't catch much in the beginning.

I feel that I'm coming from the opposite direction. I'm tuning my brain to the language before I know lots of words. Over a period of time, I should come to being able to hear the language quite easily. Once is it easy to hear, then I expect it will be easier to figure out what is being said. As I posted not too long ago, the brain learns on its own. And you would have to agree that there are many words where the meaning is quite obvious from the context, such as crying or laughing. People do say, "what are you laughing at?" or "what are you crying about?" People also say, "what are you doing?" And then people answer, "I'm doing such and such..." And then there are commands of course. "Eat!" "Don't eat!" "Stop whining!"

It amazes me how much language is repeated. The same sentences, words, and phrases are used over and over. Your brain will figure it out. It's not usually obvious the first time you hear it. And no amount of thinking will give you the logical answer. But mysteriously, the meaning suddenly becomes clear. Maybe that's after the fifth exposure or the 50th exposure. And then the next time you will be able to confirm it. And then you keep watching for it and you keep thinking to yourself, "I'm right! I'm right." A while after that, it just becomes one of those words you've known for so long that it feels natural to know what it means.

This highly repetitive language is what I want to learn first. I want to know the obvious and basic language first. Course books don't spend enough time on it. They want to advance you as quickly as possible and so the books start teaching you difficult words that are hard to grasp. I have never seen a course that has a smooth transition. They all go from "hello" to "I'm an electrical engineer specializing in mechanical solar distributions of the sub microscopic level." And so you have to sit there and pull out from memory the meaning of every word in that sentence even though you still are not even used to saying hello.

I feel I'd rather take a natural method with a natural progression and just naturally pick up what I can while naturally building the natural language in my brain. It's just natural. It's also effortless. There's nothing forced with this method. You take as much time as you need.

I'm really enjoying getting the sound of the language into my brain. Hearing the language so much really gives me this natural feeling for it. I guess I've always liked the sound of Chinese. I know that by hearing the words over and over, I am creating a model soundtrack in my brain that I will use subconsciously when I begin to speak. I can use it consciously now for that little amount of the language which I know, but I want to avoid creating a habit of having to think and needing to play my internal sound bites before speaking. When I read the words of other Chinese language learners who have been learning Chinese for quite a number of years and they say that they still make tone mistakes or say in some way that they need to be more careful when speaking, I just feel so bad that everyone falls into the same trap of studying the language. I know what it feels like to have to think about how you can express what you feel. That's why this massive exposure is necessary. In order to make the language natural to you, you need a wide variety of exposure and lots and lots of it. I know I'm not comfortable saying something unless I know and feel that I'm saying it the natural way. And it does take time for a new phrase to feel natural to me. I'm not going to be comfortable with something that was just taught to me which I had never heard before. Given some time and some more exposure I will become comfortable with it. That's why the natural method feels right to me.

What are the objections to the natural method that I always see? Some people seem to think you have to learn everything, that you can't figure things out for yourself. Hmm, thinking about it now, it seems there is this progression of beliefs. On one end of the spectrum, there are those who believe you have to have a teacher who will teach you the language. Next, there are those who will learn on there own from books and audio. And at the other end of the spectrum, people like me who think the language will just form in your brain given enough exposure.

Another objection is that it can be done but would take way too long to make it practical. This objection is a feeling of the objector. They have not come to a conclusion from a full trial but rather it comes from a worry that a lot of time would be wasted if they were not successful at natural language acquisition. While there are examples that natural language acquisition works quite well for adults, and I have written posts on what I have found, there are no examples where natural language acquisition has failed. If you have links to such failures, feel free to post them here.

I plan to progress from my current ultra-low understanding of Chinese to an ultra-high level of acquisition through my TV method. By ultra-high, I don't necessarily mean that I will be able to understand more than the average layman. I just hope and expect that I will have a fully functional vocabulary and native-like ability in the language. And if I should ask other Chinese people what such-and-such means, I will be able to learn that way until I get to the point where most of them don't even know what it means and they refer me to someone who is more educated or specialized. And then I will get a sense for what the average person is going to be able to tell me and I'll know when I need to ask an educated person. I expect to sound like a native speaker of the language at some point and to get different reactions or no reaction at all. I imagine some people will do a double-take and some will try to pinch themselves to see if they wake up from a dream. I don't know how long it will take me to get to that level, and maybe by the time I do get there, it will already be quite normal to see non-Chinese speaking Chinese so well.

Why do I have such high expectations? Frankly, I see no reason why I can't reach that level. As long as I don't stop doing what I'm doing, I expect to keep progressing. In 2011, I will switch from watching Chinese TV to watching Japanese TV and try to overcome my bad habit of thinking about the Japanese language. I will give Japanese TV 2 years and then I will go back to Chinese if I feel I need more Chinese exposure. I will keep blogging about what I'm doing and what obstacles I run into. I will refrain from trying to persuade anyone to use the TV method until I have found it to be successful. Until then, I just want to document my progress.

In the middle of writing this post, I had to go out and buy my next drama. The next one is the same genre as the first one. It says it is number 4 in this series of Chin Dynasty China. The first one was number 2 in the series. Next time, I will buy number 3. This new one has 10 discs with 3 episodes per disc. It says it is 1500 minutes all together. I think I will be able to finish watching it in 6 days. I will let you know when I've completed my first viewing of it.

雍正王朝

I've just finished watching my first complete Chinese TV drama for the first time. It's very interesting to wonder why someone is getting mad and what they are saying. I want to know why this or that person was stripped of their status and taken away. Not being able to understand 99 percent (or more) of the dialogue, but being able to see what is going on makes you wonder why. Why? Why? Why?

I will probably start watching it all over again tomorrow. I am tired of trying to avoid the Japanese subtitles. I hope the other dramas for sale are not permanently subtitled like this. Sometimes I accidentally look at the subtitles.

I was able to pick up the meaning of a few words. I think every time I watch I will acquire more and more words. The more I am exposed to those words, the deeper my knowledge of them becomes. As I gain more and more exposure to the language, I will be able to acquire words faster. The less I have to think about the words, the more I am able to hear. The less I think about what I am hearing, the more I understand.

TV method goes DVD

As I noted earlier, I have been watching Chinese TV online. However, given the reliability, quality, and continuity problems of online TV, I will be using DVDs as much as possible for the TV method. I will still call it the TV method. You can watch anything on TV, including movies so I won't call it the movie method. Also, I won't call it the DVD method because I'm not restricting myself to DVDs. I will still watch online TV whenever I want. DVDs are more convenient. I can watch whenever I want. I also don't have to miss any episodes if I own the whole series. That is why yesterday I bought a TV drama series in Chinese. I bought it used, so it was not expensive. I bought the longest one that was available. It is 2200 minutes and has 44 episodes. It's set in the 18th century. I can understand only about 1 percent of it. Since I bought it here in Japan, it has Japanese subtitles which I cannot turn off, so I try not to look at those. Yesterday, I watched all of disc 1 which has 5 episodes. There is less that I can understand compared to a drama set in the present day. But at my level, it really doesn't make much difference, now does it? The other Chinese dramas at the store are also of this type, so as long as they don't sell, there will be more that I can buy. There were some shorter, modern dramas in Chinese but I suspect they are from Taiwan. On those, the language is stated as Chinese, whereas the dramas like the one I bought, the language is stated as Peking or Beijing-language. I hope I can buy one of these box-sets once a month. They are a really good value.