Download Chinese Movie Subtitles!

Movies are some of the best tools to learn a foreign language. The language used in movies is more or less applicable to daily life, and the speed at which the actors speak is natural. The problem though is that the intermediate or even the advanced learner might not be able to pick up some of the words in the movie. The obvious solution is to look at the subtitles while watching the movie, and to look up words you don't know.

It's easier said than done...

You have look up the word in the dictionary. Now if you are learning Chinese (or Japanese), you probably have to do the extra step of looking up the Chinese character(s) themselves. It sounds easy enough but let's say you find an unknown word in every sentence or two... a typical movie will easily contain a thousand sentences or more. That means flipping through pages of a dictionary (or maybe typing or writing into an electronic dictionary) more than a thousand times! Not exactly time-efficient!

If only you could download subtitles, then you can use popup/mouseover dictionaries and save time not having to flip pages or scribble into a dictionary...

Well it turns out you can download subtitles for Chinese movies! I'm not so surprised though. Sure Facebook and Youtube may be blocked, but you can download a heck of a lot more! Unfortunately I haven't something like that for Japanese.

So if you are an intermediate or advanced learner try learning from movies.  
If you don't like mainland Chinese or Taiwanese movies, then that might be a problem...

Here's the link: http://www.subom.com/