Learning through films is a powerful method as it involves images, sound, and emotions. The visual content is engaging and helps comprehension. The audio content will help you develop a general sense of the language sounds and improve your pronunciation. More importantly, a film makes you connect with the actors; it evokes emotions of love, empathy, admiration, anger etc. Research in neuroscience has shown that information tagged with strong emotional value is more easily learned and recalled from our memory. Also, films is an excellent way of immersing into the culture, history, and mentality of a country.
But how can we watch a film in a ‘learning mode’? The setup that has worked in my case is three windows opened on the screen: actual film with English subtitles, transcript in Russian and a Google Translator like below:
I suggest that you watch trying to understand as much as possible without looking at the subtitles. When you have an unknown word, press pause and look at both translation and transcript on the left. You can find the transcript of many Russian films on Vvord or here. Google Translator is very useful to confirm you match correctly the translation with the corresponding word on the left. Also, it points you to the initial form of a noun or verb which you can then investigate more or hear by pressing the ‘play’ button. On the picture above, ‘квартиру’ is the accusative form of the noun ‘квартира’ (apartment).
It is understandable that it would be tiring or impossible to translate every single word, hence, feel free to skip through so your learning has a flow and you feel happy. In the beginning, just focus on the unknown words that you manage to guess, or the ones you are curious to learn. You can always watch the film again and build on more vocabulary.
Below, you can find the links to some popular Russian films which you can watch using the above method. Enjoy!!!
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