[jraby3]

Other than watching shows in a foreign language and reading subtitles, is there any specific way you use it to learn a foreign language?

I am learning Hebrew but I find that many Hebrew Netflix shows do not offer English subtitles. It's really frustrating.

[watwut]

I watch in foreign language without subtitles or with foreign language subtitles. I use language reactor so the translation is right there, on mouse hover. It also allows you to quickly rewind the scene, so you can watch and hear same dialog multiple times. That helps a lot too.

Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.

[littlecranky67]

I used languagereactor.com for learning spanish for a while (a browser extensions that supplements netflix for language learning). It allows a second subtitle track, shows word translations on hover over the subtitle, and bookmark words to your vocab database with a single click. I exported the vocab after a few days into Anki to learn them. It is a bit finicky to setup and learn the tool, but overall good motivator to keep learning.

After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.

Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.

[mft_]

Forgive the basic questions, but you were using Spanish original videos, with first-order Spanish subtitles already available, then adding second (English?) subtitles via language reactor?

I ask because I went down this path a little to help my German learning, but struggled to find the right combination of videos at the right level with the right subtitles available. (I was trying to use free apps/services though).

[littlecranky67]

You can have any subtitle track be "blurry" in language reactor and only show it on keypress or mouse hover. Depending on your learning level, listening comprehension etc. you might not need a first or second subtitle, or configure the subtitle to be "blurry" by default.

Having 2 subtitles is only helpful in the beginning, where you do not understand entire sentences or sentence constructs sometimes, but you want to understand that entire sentence to continue to follow the storyline (and continue to be engaged). Very quickly I switched to having only the spanish subtitle and lookup individual words.

IIRC, Languagereactor also enables all the subtitles (netflix somehow filters the list of available subtitles based on the country you are in). But I should add that I am actually living in spain, so all the content has spanish subtitles available (and english, which I used as a reference instead of german).