Indeed, movies in original language subtitled in English can be useful, but my experience is that the effort to try and decipher native speed spoken language clashes with trying to read the English subtitles and understand how they connect to the spoken text, and in the end I just give up, read the subtitles, and don't make the effort to listen to the spoken text except for the few words I recognise. So don't dismiss English movies with Greek subtitles just yet. And you are combining two easy tasks (listening in English and reading in the language you learn) rather than an easy and a difficult one (reading in English and trying to understand spoken words in the new language, reading comprehension is usually ahead of hearing comprehension when learning a new language). Having the words written down rather than spoken helps quickly see where they begin and where they end, and often relationships between words masked by pronunciation become obvious when you see their orthography.
By Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets - Friday, 5 March 2010, 07:42 AMĪctually, in my experience with learning Dutch (nowadays my main language, although French is my native language), I found that English movies with Dutch subtitles were a great way to learn new vocabulary.