Foreign Language Immersion Tip
Trying to keep a foreign language alive can be a tough proposition when those that surround you are not familiar with it. It’s been 15 years since I moved out of Germany, and my comfort with the language suffered significantly during that time.
About a year ago I wanted to take on French as my next language, but decided to put it off until I can reclaim my old comfort level with German. Immersion is my main tool, and I achieve it most days by listening to SWR’s cont.ra radio and by paying attention to newscasts at Ard.de.
Today I’ve discovered a new method of further adding to my German immersion efforts.
For a while now I tried finding German programs and movies on the many torrent networks, but sometimes I come out empty handed. After downloading a movie with Dutch subtitles, I noticed that the subtitles are simply an external text file.
My video player checks the directory for a .srt subtitle file, and if present, subtitles show up during the playback. So now all I have to do is try to find a German .srt file, and I can do some learning while kicking it back. During my search I found an excellent site with over 238,000 subtitles free for download. The site is opensubtitles.org and as the name suggests it’s free to use and download from. Check it out next time you want or need subtitles for a goodie snagged somewhere on the net.