How effective is watching Youtube videos with translations?

Language Learning
#1

I’ve seen people on Youtube who say they learned A2 level Japanese just by watching anime with English translations. Another guy from Russia said he learned almost fluent English in 2 years by watching 5 hours of English movies a day with Russian subtitles underneath.

I’m dubious how effective this actually is because I just watched a children’s cartoon in my target language with English translations underneath and I found myself starting to zone out of the spoken language because I was focused on reading the English subtitles.

Obviously I’m still doing Clozemaster and other learning but is watching videos in your target language just a complete waste of time in the beginner stages? Because all I can essentially hear is 1 word I recognise every 300 words, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything.

1 Like
#2

Thats a really interesting topic. My approach always was grinding the hell out of clozemaster (also a little bit of anki) and then when ive gotten to a level, where i can understand at least around 80%, I start watching videos with target language subtitles. Rest of the words im either sentence mining or letting clozemaster teach me that. Id also be happy if someone could share their experience.