What do you watch and how do you learn from it?

[Anju]

As any person who has shown interest in Korea, you would know that Koreans have very good music (kpop) and shows (dramas or variety). I was curious as to what you guys enjoyed watching and how you used this form of entertainment to learn more about the language.

Passively learning I've found that I can read the subtitles when they appear, however my reading speed isn't fast enough to get the rest of the sentence, so I can only grasp a few words before it goes off again. Though the language used in variety shows such as running man and infinity challenge happen to be quite simple and repetitive.

Overall I still need english subtitles but i'm slowly losing those crutches to attempt to watch an episode without them. 

What about you guys?

[Nekomimi_mode]

I've always been a pretty fast reader so I never encountered the whole "subtitles are too fast" problem. However my mom will make me pause a movie multiple times because the subtitles went by too fast, so I know where you're coming from. I still completely need the subtitles(I can only make out a few words without them) but I find in a lot of romance dramas they tend to repeat certain phrases so I know a handful of frequently occurring ones. Believe it or not the most Korean I have learned has been from the songs, ballads to be exact. Ballads tend to stretch the words out enough so I can actually hear the pronunciation and remember it later. Stuff like rap is also helpful because I love a good beat. If the beat is good enough to get stuck in your head you'll want to be able to sing along, and you can only sing along if you know the lyrics. Needless to say I know the lyrics to a lot of Korean raps and songs with crazy beats. It still gets pretty hard to sing along though, I can only speak so fast before it's a never ending tongue twister. A lot of Korean phonetics are hair splitting close and that gets really hard to sing if they're strung in a sentence together. I can also sing them while I'm doing stuff as opposed to Korean dramas where I'll need to be there in order to read the subtitles or I'll miss something. Also once you know the lyrics to a song you can try to translate it into your language, I do this often. I'll be singing Overdose by EXO and then I'll try singing the whole song in English. It sounds terrible because I have to add or remove words to get the same meaning as the song but it's fun all the same. I think the main idea with learning another language is to practice it as much as you can and have fun with it. And that's definitely going to happen if I keep listening to K-pop. When the brain equates something with fun they tell you to do it more often, and I want my brain to tell me learning Korean is fun. Anju have you ever considered watching interviews or product reviews in Korean? They'll be much shorter(only about 5-10 minutes) and won't effect the suspense if you pause them a bunch of times. Personally I love watching reviews of Korean beauty products. I get to learn Korean and the latest beauty trends at once, it's like killing two birds with one fabulous smelling subtitled stone!