Watching movies is certainly a good way to help your foreign language skills, but it’s practicing comprehension more than anything.
Being forced to formulate sentences on your own is a different skill that requires practice as well if you actually want to be able to speak a language. If Duolingo is too mechanical for you, there are other apps that let you find and chat with people who are interested in language exchange.
You can try any online app (like lemmy) where you can chat with native speakers.
You can join Discord servers for practicing your speaking (I would like to know a good open source alternative, but I don’t) or some chat roulette. But first you need to have good comprehension, if you have it you probably can put few sentences together.
I’ve found that when I watch something in another language with subtitles, I find myself going by what I heard, and using the subtitles to support or reinforce sections or words I didn’t understand. I often end up disagreeing with how things are translated, or there is something said in the foreign language that can’t simply be translated. In other words, I think using subtitles as reinforcement can be useful, whereas just reading every line and not thinking in the other language for yourself might not really be helping you much.
Watching movies is certainly a good way to help your foreign language skills, but it’s practicing comprehension more than anything.
Being forced to formulate sentences on your own is a different skill that requires practice as well if you actually want to be able to speak a language. If Duolingo is too mechanical for you, there are other apps that let you find and chat with people who are interested in language exchange.
You can try any online app (like lemmy) where you can chat with native speakers.
You can join Discord servers for practicing your speaking (I would like to know a good open source alternative, but I don’t) or some chat roulette. But first you need to have good comprehension, if you have it you probably can put few sentences together.
I’ve found that when I watch something in another language with subtitles, I find myself going by what I heard, and using the subtitles to support or reinforce sections or words I didn’t understand. I often end up disagreeing with how things are translated, or there is something said in the foreign language that can’t simply be translated. In other words, I think using subtitles as reinforcement can be useful, whereas just reading every line and not thinking in the other language for yourself might not really be helping you much.