I never would have thought that a streamer would be helpful in my language-learning. To provide a bio, Simpleflips is a streamer on Twitch and YouTube who mainly plays rom-hacks of the Nintendo 64 game Super Mario 64.
The subtitles option in his videos are adequate in matching his audio. As such, I have been using the subtitles on his videos for learning Russian, German, and Hindi–all three of which I am still struggling with. Though, it should be noted that he does speak with TV-14 levels of humor.
It is not a perfect method, but it is good enough if you want to use subtitles, especially since SimpleFlips uses very simple language throughout his streams. It makes sense considering the fact that when you play a game, you are more focused on playing it than on speaking.
It also makes sense from a sociolinguistic perspective, since we all use language in different contexts. Within those different contexts, different words and word frequencies appear. A university lecture would be completely different from a streamer like SimpleFlips. It would be difficult learning with subtitles on a lecture, but not so on a stream, or at least the highlights of a particular stream.
Bruh.
Sources
- Gee, James Paul. \”Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses.\” 5th Edition. Routledge. 2015.
- SimpleFlips. \”I\’m About To Unlock.\” YouTube. 2021.
- \”The Water Upwarp BLJ.\” YouTube. 2021.