▲ ▼ Show meaning of words in a video
When I'm watching a movie and If I don't understand a word I pause the movie and look up the word in the dictionary to understand that word. Streaming services like Amazon Prime show details about that particular scene when paused like Cast, Trivia etc. in their X-Ray feature but not synonyms or thesaurus for the dialogue.
Say I'm watching a video and press a special key e.g. 'S' and Synonyms pop up for the words in the dialogue sentence except basic grammar. It's not like every word in the sentence requires synonyms, there will be usually couple of hard words in a dialogue depending upon the movie.
I feel this is a great way to learn language, Me and my friends improved our English language skills by watching Hollywood movies and I'm sure there are many like us around the world.
This seems interesting, just wondering if it's possible. Does this sound like the flow you're looking for?
1. Turn on Amazon Prime (or other streaming
platform) show/movie
2. English subtitles display
3. Option to click words in the subtitles and have
synonyms be displayed
Right, that's exactly what I am looking for. I guess doing this for streaming services would be a start and perhaps later a plugin for VLC if that's possible.
For the specific case of learning a foreign language, I wonder if it would help to have audio in one language and subtitles in a different language (one familiar language and one less familiar language, and sometimes switch which is which). I believe Netflix supports subtitles in a different language than audio
Foreign language subtitles are definitely helpful while learning new language, adding the feature to display synonyms to hard words can make it even better in my opinion.
I am not sure I understand how "synonyms" would help to learn a language. Is this meant just to understand the meaning of the word?
I understand 'thesaurus definition' though.
May be I didn't articulate it well, Usually English drama & period movies have dialogues with some obscure words I don't know meaning of and I pause it to search for the synonyms. I feel this does improve my knowledge of the language.
Can you please define 'knowledge of the language'? Do you want to read, write or talk? In my view, what you describe would help with reading.
I guess so, Reading would be the direct consequence but I don't think there's a clear separation between read, write or talk for this because if I learn a new word while watching a movie with the help of something like how @KeMonte suggests, then I might use that word while speaking or writing as well.
I believe that your statement is false (at least based on my personal observation). When you learn a word from a movie, you learn understanding its meaning. In order to use the word you need to know the context in which it can be used and how it fits these contexts. In my view learning words by watching a movie won't help much with talking or writing. This may differ for different words (e.g. the context for nouns is simple, but for conjunctions it is much trickier). Do you see what I mean? Or did you mean some other way of "learning" words while watching a movie?
You'd be surprised how many people use movies to improve their English language skills in the countries where English is not spoken natively. Just visit a college dorm of a developing country where English is not spoken natively. When I was in college, Internet access was very limited and we used to watch Harry Potter movies in loop, pausing at every dialogue and check the meaning for words we didn't know.
Of course I'm not telling watching movies would give anyone university level English proficiency, But watching movies to improve language skills is real - https://explore-blog.griffith.edu.au/improve-your-english-watch-movies/ .