Sharing a new way of learning of Spanish with Netflix subtitles
Some of my friends here on SD have probably noticed my recent absence. I stay "take a break from SD" periodically in order to focus my learning in new ways. When I am on SD I spend a lot of time trying to help other users, sometimes to the detriment of my own learning progress. Someday, God willing, I may learn to balance both things, but now is not that time. 
Anyway, I wanted to share with you a method that I have developed to improve my writing skills while simultaneously improving my knowledge of Spanish grammar, vocabulary, idioms, etc. Following is a brief description of the method and a link to a quiz on Quizlet that I made for drilling the method.
By the way, if you are not interested in doing all the work in the following steps, you can simply go to Quizlet and use the quizzes I have created. You can even copy my quizzes, make them your own, and delete, add, and edit to your hearts content.
Download the Spanish and English subtitles from an movie or TV episode on Netflix. Of course, this requires a Netflix subscription. The technique for doing this is described in the following YouTube link. You may need to watch the Youtube video several times, pause it, etc. to master the technique, but it does work. This technique assumes the use of Google Chrome. DL Netflix Subs Time for this step...about 3 minutes once you get used to doing it.
Open both downloaded subtitle files in Subtitle Edit one at a time. Use SubEdit to clean up the files a bit to remove dashes, and other stuff such as bracketed comments for the hearing impaired, etc. Save the file as text only without time stamps. I also choose the unbreak lines option so I get most sentences onto one line for the following step. Estimated time...5-10 minutes if you are an experienced SubEdit user.
Open both text files in Excel or Open Office Calc. Copy and paste so that you get both languages in one file, one in Column C and the other in Column D. Compare the two languages and move things around a little so that each subtitle in English lines up with the Spanish. Since both are from Netflix, they already line up pretty well, so this only takes a few minutes to fix. Number the lines consecutively using fill in column B. This will help later on with sorting. Estimated time...15 minutes.
Read all the subtitles and choose the ones that you would like to learn / practice. Place a 1 in column A for the ones you choose. When you are done choosing you can sort on this column to get all of your chosen sentences together for the next step. Create some hints to append to the English subtitles in parentheses. At the very least, you often need to do this to specify whether "you" should be treated as tú, usted, ustedes or vosotros. Also, whether car is coche, auto, carro, etc. You can see the types of hints that I create if you look at the Quizlet quiz that I link below. Sometimes I even write some of the Spanish in the hint if it is really new to me. I then remove these crutches by editing in Quizlet while practicing the quiz. Estimated time...8-10 hours, but during all of this time you are learning tons of Spanish....grammar, vocabulary, idioms, alternative sentence structures (Spanish is SO flexible in this regard)
Copy and paste the Spanish and English sentences with hints into Quizlet. One great thing about Quizlet is that both the English and Spanish are spoken while you practice. Hearing the Spanish really helps with learning where accents should be placed and comprehension. Estimated time...2 minutes.
Use any of the Quizlet methods of drilling. The most demanding is the Learn option which forces you to type everything exactly correct except for commas and periods and capitalization. I typically only use this one method. I show the English and type the Spanish. Estimated time for a 100 question set...4-6 hours the first time and maybe only an hour once you have mastered the set via practice. You can stop at any time and when you come back to Quizlet you can start where you left off.
Here is a link for one episode of the TV show Velvet. I have done 4 episodes so far, and plan to do several more. You can find them via search or by clicking on my user name.
I especially hope that some of my advanced learner friends such as Feliz, Bosque and Mardle give this a try. If anyone wants to do all the steps for some other TV show or movie and runs into problems in execution just leave me a PM and I will try to help you out. Think of this as Duolingo on steroids.
By the way, I recommend doing this only for shows that are originally done in Spanish. If you use this method for a show that was originally done in English, I would be wary of the quality of the Spanish subtitles. And you never want to spend time drilling with material that may be full of errors.
3 Answers
Hola, Dilken!
Nice to see you, again
I'm not a subscriber to Netflix. The best I can do is to play movies with Cyberlink on my laptop. When I play movies I am able to have Spanish and English subtitles show up at the same time. It would be ideal to have it all written out.
Very nice, dill, I have tried a couple of exercises...not easy, good job if you can do them fast
Wow, what a lot of work. I suspect I have got lazy. I don't write enough in Spanish nor do I have the opportunity to speak much Spanish though I do have a group lesson once a week. I often watch programmes on rtve and sometimes copy and paste subtitles into a word document, but I do not do enough focused learning.
