[jgwil2]

> with french subtitles (!)

This is crucial. Watching movies in a foreign language can be difficult because of how fast the dialog is, but if you use subtitles in your language, you will always be thinking in your language first, then translating to the target language. Put subtitles on in the target language so that you can catch words that you wouldn't catch from the audio only, but you are still immersing yourself completely in that language.

[aquadrop]

The problem with french subtitles is that for many popular series/movies subtitles don't match the actual french speech. Looks like they are just translating English subtitles separately or something.

[usr1106]

It's necessary to shorten and simplify dialogs. Not everything that is said would fit on the screen.

Often I can understand how they shortened it, sometimes I understand only one variant. And of course sometimes everything is just too fast.

Still, the French subtitles are essential for me to understand French movies.

(studied French in school decades ago and semi-actively trying to stop forgetting)

[wrycoder]

Especially for French, since, like English, the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.

I came out of high school with four years of Latin and three years of German.

Being a language expert, I thought I'd try the beginning French course. The first day in class, the professor began rattling off in French, and the other students seemed to have no problem with that, having apparently had several years of high school French. I couldn't make heads or tails of what what going on and quickly dropped the course.

[usr1106]

> the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.

Not at all. French is over 95% many to one: From a given spelling it's clear how to pronounce it. Of course you need to know the rules and enough practice. Just writing dictations is really hard, because the same pronunciation can be spelled various ways. And it's not even enough to know how to spell the word. You need to understand the meaning of the sentence, because there are endings that are not pronounced, but depend on the grammar.

English is much more many to many. The same letter combinations can have different pronunciations and the other way round. GHOTI is either pronounced fish or completely silent... GH as in enough or in right. And so on for all remaining letter (groups). You can't do that in French.

[jgwil2]

The GHOTI example is rather contrived as it ignores so much context. For instance, you're claiming that "ti" can be pronounced "sh" on the basis of the pronunciation of the Latin-derived suffix "-tion," but in fact "ti" would never, ever be pronounced that way at the end of a word. Same with silent "gh" at the beginning of a word.

[wrycoder]

Well, for me anyway, compared to Latin, German, Japanese and Spanish it's very hard to listen to and write down what's being said, which is why I gave up on the class, because that's what the professor was asking us to do.

[usr1106]

You cannot do that instinctively. It requires internalizing the rules which will take a while, a couple of months probably, longer in lower grades at school.