Pratica di Shadowing: Why we all need subtitles now - Impara a parlare inglese con YouTube
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I watch a lot of movies in TV.
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I watch a lot of movies in TV.
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On the train, at home, at the movies, while doing dishes.
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But no matter where I'm watching, I find myself constantly doing this one thing.
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I'd like to always be more.
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What?
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I'd like to always be more.
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What?
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I'd like to always be more.
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Ugh.
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I'd like to always be more.
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Oh no. It turns out this isn't unusual.
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We polled our YouTube audience and about 57% of people said
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that they feel like they can't understand the dialogue and the things that they watch unless they're using subtitles.
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But it feels like this hasn't always been the case.
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So to figure out what was going on, I made a call.
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Hi, my name is Austin Olivia Kendrick.
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I'm a professional dialogue editor for film and TV.
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I basically perform audio surgery on actors' words.
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Do you watch it subtitles?
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I do actually.
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I do a lot of the time.
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So why do you think that we all feel like we need subtitles now?
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I get asked this question all the time.
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All the time.
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It's something that is, it doesn't have a simple straightforward answer.
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It's very layered and very complex.
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And after talking to Austin for almost two hours, it's true.
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It's a very layered and complex topic.
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But everything kept pointing back to one main thing.
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Technology that got us from this… I'll get you!
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You should be kissed enough!
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No origin, no what has happened to your last… To this… I just forgot a little slim-wasted.
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Well we better put our hat down!
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Let's start with microphones.
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I'm gonna use this clip from Singin' in the Rain to show how mics used to work.
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Here's the mic, you talk towards it.
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The sound goes through the cable to the box.
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A man records it on a big record in wax."
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This scene illustrates some of the difficulties and intricacies of early sound recording.
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Mics were big, bulky, temperamental, and required creative solutions to be hidden.
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They were wired and recorded onto hard memory, like wax and eventually tape.
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No matter how many actors were in a scene, all sound got recorded to one track,
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so performers had to be diligently focused and facing a certain angle so that their words could be picked up.
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Otherwise, you couldn't hear a thing.
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But technology's improved to the point where microphones don't impede performance as much anymore.
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They've become better, smaller, wireless, and we use more of them to ensure that performances get captured.
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What we typically are working with from production dialogue is two boom microphones
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and then every actor has at least one lavalier microphone hidden somewhere on them.
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These shrinking mics have given actors the flexibility to be more naturalistic in their performances.
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They no longer need to project so that their words reach the mic.
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They can speak softly knowing that the tiny mic hidden on their body will pick up what they're saying.
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And my personal favorite example of this performance shift is Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock.
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In a 2011 speech slash roast, Tina Fey says that he speaks so quietly that she can't hear him when she's standing next to him.
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And then you play the film back and it's there somehow.
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Just listen to this whisper off between him and Will Arnett.
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I'm not afraid of you.
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Yeah.
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Well, you should be.
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Let's just see how it all shakes out in the meeting.
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Naturalism isn't always the best for intelligibility though.
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Take Tom Hardy, an actor that I personally love but who famously is a mumbler.
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Your ass is still be fomking around in the story right now if it wasn't for me.
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I mean, the mic picked that line up fine.
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Like we can definitely hear that he's talking, he's saying something.
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But once that mumble gets recorded, it's onto a dialogue editor's shoulder to make it as intelligible as possible.
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that was a lot harder when everything was analog.
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While you could pick the best takes and physically spice them together, if some piece of dialogue was truly impossible to understand,
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then actors will come in and re-record those specific lines in a process called ADR,
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or Automated Dialogue Replacement, which you can see Meryl Streep do in this scene from Postcards from the Edge.
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There's enough money in the world for a cause like yours.
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That still gets done today, but...
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ADR also costs money because you're not only paying for the actor's time, you're paying for the engineer's time and then the editor's time.
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So we try to do ADR, frankly, as little as possible.
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And so a lot of her job is making words sound better.
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The show I'm currently working on, I remember in the middle of this one word, there was just this loud metal clang that I couldn't remove.
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So I had to go in and I had to find an alternate take of it that fit, and then I had to fit it to the movement of her mouth in that moment, and then push it in.
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And once she's done with it, it's sent off to a mixer, who works to make sure the frequencies of the sound effects and music don't overlap with the frequencies of the human voice,
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something that's only possible now that the world has moved away from tape and into digital recordings.
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That is a big challenge, carving out those frequencies, that space,
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amongst every other element of the mix for the dialogue to be able to punch through
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and not be all muddied up by any other sounds that exist in that band of frequencies.
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But even with all that work, lines of dialogue can still be hard to understand.
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The kind of feeling has been if you want your movie to feel quote-unquote cinematic,
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you have to have wall-to-wall bombastic loud sound.
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A lot of people will ask like, why don't you just turn the dialogue up?
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Like just turn it up and the...
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If only it was that simple.
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Because a big thing that we want to preserve is a concept called dynamic range.
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The range between your quietest sound and your loudest sound.
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If you have your dialogue that's going to be at the same volume as an explosion that immediately follows it, the explosion is not gonna feel as big.
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You need that contrast in volume in order to give your ear a sense of scale.
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But the thing is, you can only make something so loud before it gets distorted.
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So if you want to create that wide dynamic range, you have no choice but to push those quieter sounds lower, instead of pushing the louder sounds louder.
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So, explosions go up and dialogue comes down.
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Which brings us to the Christopher Nolan of it all.
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A separate structure within the other staff.
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What is that after you, right?
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We're kicking out of orbit!
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Nearly every film of his has been criticized for its hard-to-hear dialogue that essentially begs for subtitles.
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But as this headline explains, he likes it that way.
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According to an interview in a book called The Nolan Variations, he said that he gets a lot of complaints, even from other filmmakers, who would say,
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I just saw your film and the dialogue is inaudible.
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The truth was, it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it.
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And in his 2017 interview with IndieWire, he said, we made the decision a couple of films ago that we weren't going to mix films for substandard theaters.
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And this is kind of the crux of the matter.
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The content that we watch here and here and here is not mixed for us primarily.
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Re-recording mixers mix for the widest surround sound format that is available.
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Typically like big release films, that is Dolby Atmos, which has true 3D sound up to 128 channels.
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The thing is, if you're not at a movie theater that can showcase the best sound Hollywood has to offer, you can't experience all of those channels.
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So after the movie is mixed for the 128 Atmos tracks,
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somebody has to create a separate version of the film's audio where all those same sounds live on one, or two, or five tracks.
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This is called down mixing.
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Down mixing is the process of taking that biggest mix and folding it down into formats with lesser channels available to it.
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So say Atmos down to 7.1 or 7.1 down to 5.1 or 5.1 down to stereo, stereo down to mono.
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Unlike old TVs that were gigantic and had a ton of space for speakers, TVs today are super thin.
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Like this one that I have in my living room is about the same thickness as my iPhone.
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So even though it's outputting the same mono or stereo sound that an older TV might,
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it's still going to sound worse because you have to have tiny little speakers to fit into this tiny sleek form factor.
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These tiny speakers are also usually on the back of the TV, so the down mix version of this movie
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that went from 128 channels down to just two is going to sound even muddier when it's pointing away from you.
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And when you're watching on your phone or a laptop, it's generally not much better.
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When you combine not great speakers, naturalistic mumbly performances, dynamic range featuring bombastic sounds over dialogue and a flattened mix,
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it's no wonder we have trouble hearing what's going on.
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And it seems like the industry knows this because TVs today are shipping with all kinds of settings built in, like this intelligence mode.
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You can put on active voice amplification in hopes of making that dialogue track come through just a little bit clearer.
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But of course that's more band-aid than it is solution.
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The way movies get mixed likely isn't going to revert back to super pristine dialogue.
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So the solutions we have are one, buy better speakers and only go to theaters that have impeccable sound.
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Two, take a chill pill
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and try to just worry a little bit less about picking up every single word that gets said, or three, just keep the subtitles on.
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For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, subtitles make movies and TV shows accessible,
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and this accessibility has just expanded in recent years.
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Laws have been passed to ensure that movie theaters have at least a few screenings weak with captions.
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Pretty much every streaming service has standardized them,
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and speech recognition technology has made them accessible in pretty much every YouTube video and TikTok.
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Plus they're super easy to toggle on and off.
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Contesto e Background
Nel video "Perché abbiamo tutti bisogno dei sottotitoli ora", l'autore esplora le difficoltà che molte persone, incluso un professionista del montaggio dialoghi per film e TV, riscontrano nel comprendere i dialoghi senza l'ausilio di sottotitoli. Molti spettatori, circa il 57%, affermano di avere difficoltà a seguire le conversazioni in vari contesti, sia che si tratti di guardare un film durante il viaggio sia mentre si svolgono le attività quotidiane. Questo fenomeno è riconducibile a diversi fattori, tra cui il progresso tecnologico nel campo dei microfoni e delle registrazioni audio, che ha cambiato il modo in cui i dialoghi vengono presentati nel cinema e in televisione.
Top 5 Frasi per la Comunicazione Quotidiana
- “Posso chiederti un favore?” - Essenziale per fare richieste in modo educato.
- “Non ho capito, puoi ripeterlo?” - Utile quando si ha bisogno di chiarimenti.
- “Hai appena visto quel film?” - Una buona frase per iniziare conversazioni su argomenti comuni.
- “Cosa ne pensi di questa scena?” - Perfetta per stimolare discussioni animate.
- “Puoi parlare più lentamente, per favore?” - Una richiesta comune per migliorare la comprensione.
Guida Passo-Passo per il Shadowing
Per affrontare le difficoltà presentate in questo video e migliorare la pronuncia inglese, puoi seguire questi passaggi nel tuo esercizio di shadowing in inglese:
- Ascolta attentamente: Riproduci il video e concentra la tua attenzione sui dialoghi. Presta particolare attenzione alle intonazioni e alle espressioni.
- Utilizza i sottotitoli: Se necessario, attiva i sottotitoli per seguire meglio il testo. Questo può migliorare la tua comprensione generale e darti un riferimento visivo.
- Ripeti ad alta voce: Dopo aver ascoltato una frase, prova a ripeterla a voce alta. Assicurati di imitare il ritmo e l’intonazione del parlante.
- Fai una pausa e riascolta: Se hai difficoltà con un particolare passaggio, rilassati, torna indietro e ascolta di nuovo prima di provare a ripetere.
- Confronta: Dopo aver completato l'esercizio, riascolta il dialogo originale mentre confronti la tua ripetizione. Questo ti aiuterà a identificare aree di miglioramento e perfezionare la tua tecnica.
Integrando questa pratica di conversazione in inglese nella tua routine di apprendimento, avrai la possibilità di imparare l'inglese con YouTube e affinare le tue abilità di ascolto e pronuncia, rendendoti più sicuro nelle conversazioni quotidiane.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.
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