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Do You Watch Shows With Subtitles?


Avalon
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I do sometimes. My niece just recommended this Netflix Spanish language series "Gran Hotel" with English subtitles.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Hotel_(TV_series)

"Gran hotel" started with a great premise: a poor maid in a luxury hotel goes missing, and when nobody seems to care much what happened to her, her brother shows up to find out what happened. Unfortunately, this intriguing mystery gets reduced to almost a side plot, and the main storyline becomes the soap-ish love affair between the brother (who takes a job as a waiter at the hotel to go undercover) and the daughter of the family who owns the hotel. I didn't care much for the plot lines of the series, but I absolutely loved the visuals: the clothes, the cars, the gardens, and most of all the spectacular hotel. The hotel shown in the movie is actually the former summer palace of the Spanish monarchy. The beauty of the former palace made my jaw drop, and the visuals alone made it worth watching what was otherwise a fairly mediocre show.

 

I think there are a bunch of Spanish series available on Netflix nowadays. If it's still available, I highly recommend "Velvet," perhaps my favorite TV show of all time, in Spanish or English. It's about the great once-in-a-lifetime love between Alberto, the scion of the most prestigious house of fashion in Spain, and Ana, a poor seamstress. He takes over the reins of the family business when his father dies, only to discover that the house in financial ruin. To save the business, he has to get a massive loan, and the only man who will loan him the huge sum has one condition: that he marries his daughter Cristina, who's been in love with Alberto since they were kids. You can imagine, complications ensue. Besides, the great love story, all the side plots involving the other characters are engaging and entertaining. I think I watched every episode in the first season something like five times. Seasons 1 and 2 are brilliant, Season 3 is pretty good, Season 4 kinda sucked because Miguel Angel Silvestre wasn't available for filming until the very end. Still, all in all, I absolutely love the show, and at some point in the future will probably go back and watch all the episodes yet again.

 

I confess, the only TV shows/movies I can watch in Spanish without subtitles are from Spain. Movies/shows from Mexico & Argentina I have to watch with Spanish subtitles (eek! reading English subtitles while listening to Spanish would fry my poor little brain) because otherwise I would miss too much.

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I forget which movie now but I remember some movie made in Scotland and though they were speaking English their accents were so thick there were subtitles.

LOL, I once saw a movie about a bunch of cockney kids, and I swear the accents were so thick that after a few minutes, my brother and I looked at each other and asked, "OMG, where are the subtitles?" After about a half-hour, you could start picking up what they were saying, but it was hard to follow the movie since we had basically missed the first 30 minutes.

 

"Aguila roja" is available on the Internet, Aguila roja all nine seasons

But before you get too excited, you need two things to watch it:

1) a VPN to trick the website into thinking you're in Spain because access is geoblocked

2) an understanding of Spanish because no English subtitles are available; Spanish subtitles might be available, not sure

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LOL, I once saw a movie about a bunch of cockney kids, and I swear the accents were so thick that after a few minutes, my brother and I looked at each other and asked, "OMG, where are the subtitles?" After about a half-hour, you could start picking up what they were saying, but it was hard to follow the movie since we had basically missed the first 30 minutes.

 

"Aguila roja" is available on the Internet, Aguila roja all nine seasons

But before you get too excited, you need two things to watch it:

1) a VPN to trick the website into thinking you're in Spain because access is geoblocked

2) an understanding of Spanish because no English subtitles are available; Spanish subtitles might be available, not sure

 

Thanks but my Spanish was high school Spanish and that was many many years ago.

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I forget which movie now but I remember some movie made in Scotland and though they were speaking English their accents were so thick there were subtitles.

"Survivor" has occasionally subtitled players whose accents (usually deep south) were very strong. Made me laugh. I'm usually okay with British accents, I attribute that to starting watching Monty Python when I was 16.

 

I often leave closed-captioning on. When I have it off, I'll click it on briefly & rewind when there's a line I've missed. I did that just a couple of nights ago, with Moulin Rouge, I was never certain what the Duke was shouting at the very end when he approached the stage with a gun. "My way! My way!" (meaning the show should end the way he'd wanted).

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  • 2 weeks later...

It all started when I first rented the early Mike Leigh films which did not supply any subtitles. I could not tell what the actors were saying. So I realized that I could watch everything else if I wanted to with subtitles. Even the BBC productions were easier to watch and it made sure that I would not miss the humor because of the language. At any rate, it expanded to pretty much everything and I simply disregard the subtitles if I do not need them. I turn them off for most new shows because they do get in the way of charts, etc.

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The excellent gay-themed film, "Beautiful Thing" which takes place in a London suburb (Thamesmead South) where the thick accent took me quite a while to begin to actually understand. I saw it a couple of times before it became available on DVD. I made certain when I purchased my DVD copy that it had the option for English captions for the hard of hearing, even though I am not hard of hearing! Since then, I have enjoyed watching it many times!

 

Additionally, one of my favorite French films, "La Belle et la Bête" a great 1946 film version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, by the amazing gay film maker Jean Cocteau, has always been watched by me with English subtitles. I have no problem with subtitles but I once spent almost 45 minutes convincing one of my best friends to attend a showing of this film at a local Art Film Theatre because he balked at having to read the subtitles and watch the movie simultaneously. Long story short: he apologized later and told me the film was indeed one of the best he'd ever seen!

 

TruHart1 :cool:

Edited by TruHart1
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The most important thing on acquiring a language is switching your brain to that language. Your brain wants to understand and is going to make the quickest decision to make sense of something. If you provide a help in your first language your brain will never switch. Force you brain as much as you can to have sources only in the target language. Do not use English subtitles if you are trying to learn the other language.

Of course if you are not doing a learning activity, if you just want to watch and understand your telenovela, do use English subtitles.

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I always watch foreign films with subtitles. I honestly can’t tolerate dubbed versions. It somehow takes away from the overall experience.

 

In Argentina the only movies that are doubled are kids movies, and TV movies before cable. It was unthinkable to go to theater to watch a doubled movie that was not a Walt Disney cartoon. I fully agree with you.

 

It was shocking when I visited Paris to learn how francophone-centered Parisians are. When you want to go to the movies you have to be extra careful you are choosing a show with the original soundtrack. They double everything.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m08y90YHkE1rqfhi2o1_250.gif

Yes, everything.

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In Argentina the only movies that are doubled are kids movies, and TV movies before cable. It was unthinkable to go to theater to watch a doubled movie that was not a Walt Disney cartoon. I fully agree with you.

It was shocking when I visited Paris to learn how francophone-centered Parisians are. When you want to go to the movies you have to be extra careful you are choosing a show with the original soundtrack. They double everything.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m08y90YHkE1rqfhi2o1_250.gif

Yes, everything.

 

By "double" do you mean dub. Or have I been using that incorrectly my whole life (not that it would surprise me)? At any rate, I would never, ever use doubling/dubbing rather than using furnished subtitles. Could you imagine hearing Cary Grant's in some crazy French voice?

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By "double" do you mean dub. Or have I been using that incorrectly my whole life (not that it would surprise me)? At any rate, I would never, ever use doubling/dubbing rather than using furnished subtitles. Could you imagine hearing Cary Grant's in some crazy French voice?

 

I guess you are right, my misspellings are frequent. In Spanish we say "doblar/doblaje", I am probably writing Spanglish.

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I guess you are right, my misspellings are frequent. In Spanish we say "doblar/doblaje", I am probably writing Spanglish.

 

No, I just thought that "dub" may just be slang for doubling which is really the proper word. I just have always used dub and dubbing. It is also somehow associated with knighthood but let's not even go there.

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Yes, because I speak English and a little Spanish but not enough to understand a "telenovela".

Ugh, please do not refer to shows like "Gran hotel" as a "telenovela." A telenovela is basically a Latinamerican soap opera, in other words, a 5-times a week series produced primarily for bored housewives. "Gran hotel" and other series like it (plenty of series from Spain have made their way to Netflix) are once-a-week shows produced for general audiences. Because telenovelas are a daily shows with a limited audience, the quality of production, acting, and scripts suffers due to the rushed shooting schedules and tight budgets. The quality of shows like "Gran hotel," on the other hand, is more on par with once-a-week American series like "This Is Us" or "Quantico." It's really unfair to call "Gran hotel" a telenovela because it's so much better than your typical soap opera.

 

That said, I wasn't crazy about "Gran hotel." It started out with a great premise, the disappearance of a poor maid in a luxury hotel, but ended up as the love story between the maid's brother (who goes to the hotel & gets a job as a waiter in order to investigate his sister's disappearance) and the daughter of the family who owns the hotel. But the show's visuals definitely make it worth watching. Set around 1900, the dresses and suits of the era's Spanish aristocracy are a knockout. I loved the sumptuous luxury shown in the interior and garden scenes. Most of all, I loved the hotel itself, which in the real world is not a hotel but the former summer palace of the Spanish monarchy. In every outdoor scene of the hotel (the indoor shots were done in studio), my jaw dropped because the palace's architecture is so amazing.

 

Like I said, Netflix features a number of series from Spain that are definitely worth watching. My favorite series of all time, whether Spanish or English, is "Velvet," the impossible love story between the scion of Madrid's most prestigious house of fashion and a poor seamstress. For all the bi/straight guys on this board, "Vis a vis" (I think Netflix gave it the English title "Lockup") is a good series packed with female full-frontal nudity and lesbian sex scenes. Also, the villain in "Lockup" is so deliciously evil. I've heard really good things about "Cable Girls" and "Morocco" as well, although I haven't seen either one.

 

Edited to add: all the Spanish series on Netflix give the option of either the dubbed version (eek!) or the original Spanish version with English subtitles, Spanish subtitles, or no subtitles at all. If your Spanish is good enough to watch the Spanish version (either without subtitles or with a bit of help from the Spanish subtitles), you'll be amazed how much your Spanish improves after watching just one series.

 

Second edited to add: since I am 1000% gay, why did I bother to watch all 24 70-minute episodes of beaver-saturated "Lockup"? Because one of the prison guards was played by this guy:

http://agency.muchoartemanagement.com/1716-thickbox/harlys-becerra-cuba.jpg

Edited by BSR
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Ugh, please do not refer to shows like "Gran hotel" as a "telenovela." A telenovela is basically a Latinamerican soap opera, in other words, a 5-times a week series produced primarily for bored housewives. "Gran hotel" and other series like it (plenty of series from Spain have made their way to Netflix) are once-a-week shows produced for general audiences. Because telenovelas are a daily shows with a limited audience, the quality of production, acting, and scripts suffers due to the rushed shooting schedules and tight budgets. The quality of shows like "Gran hotel," on the other hand, is more on par with once-a-week American series like "This Is Us" or "Quantico." It's really unfair to call "Gran hotel" a telenovela because it's so much better than your typical soap opera.

 

That said, I wasn't crazy about "Gran hotel." It started out with a great premise, the disappearance of a poor maid in a luxury hotel, but ended up as the love story between the maid's brother (who goes to the hotel & gets a job as a waiter in order to investigate his sister's disappearance) and the daughter of the family who owns the hotel. But the show's visuals definitely make it worth watching. Set around 1900, the dresses and suits of the era's Spanish aristocracy are a knockout. I loved the sumptuous luxury shown in the interior and garden scenes. Most of all, I loved the hotel itself, which in the real world is not a hotel but the former summer palace of the Spanish monarchy. In every outdoor scene of the hotel (the indoor shots were done in studio), my jaw dropped because the palace's architecture is so amazing.

 

Like I said, Netflix features a number of series from Spain that are definitely worth watching. My favorite series of all time, whether Spanish or English, is "Velvet," the impossible love story between the scion of Madrid's most prestigious house of fashion and a poor seamstress. For all the bi/straight guys on this board, "Vis a vis" (I think Netflix gave it the English title "Lockup") is a good series packed with female full-frontal nudity and lesbian sex scenes. Also, the villain in "Lockup" is so deliciously evil. I've heard really good things about "Cable Girls" and "Morocco" as well, although I haven't seen either one.

 

Edited to add: all the Spanish series on Netflix give the option of either the dubbed version (eek!) or the original Spanish version with English subtitles, Spanish subtitles, or no subtitles at all. If your Spanish is good enough to watch the Spanish version (either without subtitles or with a bit of help from the Spanish subtitles), you'll be amazed how much your Spanish improves after watching just one series.

 

Second edited to add: since I am 1000% gay, why did I bother to watch all 24 70-minute episodes of beaver-saturated "Lockup"? Because one of the prison guards was played by this guy:

http://agency.muchoartemanagement.com/1716-thickbox/harlys-becerra-cuba.jpg

 

You don’t get sarcasm or humor, right?

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