We were thinking about some more creative ways to get used to a language. We thought, how do children learn more words in their native language: cartoons.
We ended up watching Pokémon in Dutch (with English subtitles). My partner learned a couple of phrases and commonly used words in Dutch. We ended up watching some fragments in Italian as well. We looked for the catchphrase from team rocket in Dutch and Italian and tried to look if they say the same in both languages (they both have a little different translation).
Then we talked a little about the movie and series culture. For Dutch people it’s not very common to dub movies or series, for example: movie titles will never be translated to Dutch and only the cartoons and movies which are intended for very small children are dubbed, but on the Belgian TV, you might even catch those in English.
However for Italians, they like to dub everything and also translate the title in Italian. For example, the Pokémon theme song is remade for Italian TV, but for the Dutch version, the theme song is the original English version that I thought everyone knew. Apparently Dutch is one of the few languages where they don’t change all the songs to the native language.
Then we discussed some more of our childhood cartoons we watched and looked at the some parts of some cartoons in both languages which was weird but funny at the same time.
I think my partner learned a couple of Dutch words during our Pokémon episodes. Cartoons might be an easy way to learn some basics of a language, since it is meant to be easy so that kids would understand it.
Comments