My husband had sent me a wonderful recipe for re-learning a language after years of disuse. One of the suggestions was to watch language films with English subtitles for fourteen hours in a week. So, since I don’t have any of those at home, I went searching.
I found this introduction to the Universal Studios 1931 Spanish-language Dracula. Now I have something fun to talk about in the interview and we’ll have an excuse to watch movies!
I always recommend that my students watch films with the subtitles off, for the same reason I tell them not to write translations in their books: their eyes will automatically be drawn to the information in their native language, and they’ll think they know the word/dialogue, when they are actually getting most of their information from the translations. I suppose it depends on how fluent you are: I know if I watched a German film without subtitles, I wouldn’t understand enough to be useful.
I think that it is important to be able to understand the movie. I watch using subtitles when I need to. Right now I need to. And, when I show the Dracula film in class, I will have the subtitles if they need them.