The title of the post is not about a real invention, it's about what helps us understand what is going on in a movie if English is our foreign language. There are so many various manners of speaking and what a pity, even pretty nice ones are not compatible with our ears :) Sometimes I can't even guess what it is all about. You can listen and re-listen a fragment up to five times but get no idea what he/she is talking about, especially when he speaks too fast and/or has a weird accent and/or this is an idiom. Often some words are just omitted. And the magic of subtitles comes into play. Enable subtitles for this fragment, and you'll see that sometimes it is uttered as it supposed to be, almost in such a way you'd utter it by yourself (except your accent).
If you are unable to get a phrase from the first attempt you have to rewind and try again with subtitles but after a while it becomes a torture and we have two possible problems:
- Unconsciously you start to read subtitles before something has been uttered. So the sense of the exercise is lost: you cease to strain every nerve to understand.
- You don't read subtitles but realize that you don't comprehend. You start to blame yourself, become nervous :)
Moreover, sometimes you have to use a dictionary (I use ABBYY Lingvo).
What to do? Practice more? Maybe. But from my experience it is a slow process, but who knows, maybe because of its slowness we just don't notice that we become better.
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