Pat WW TP-2

I had an exciting tutoring session today. As usual, I had emailed worksheets to Cyriaque as homework and as a quick review before our next session. This week, in addition to review of the worksheets, we watched a movie with English subtitles. This was one of Cyriaque’s requests during our first meeting. So today, we watched “Gladiator” starring Russell Crowe.

I had not thought of it before, but English subtitles are designed for the hearing impaired. This means that in addition to captions of the dialogue there is text describing the sound effects of the movie. If you’ve seen this film, you know that the first 15 minutes of it contain a big battle scene between the Roman legions and the German tribes complete with horses, dogs, firebombs, blood, and mayhem. So, the subtitles were full of more sound descriptions than dialogue. We had to stop the disc every few seconds as Cyriaque discovered completely new vocabulary words describing the sounds of the movie.

So today’s new vocabulary words were: whispering, rustling, whinnying, barking, shrieking, screaming, groaning, grunting, panting, growling, whining, snarling, neighing, howling, and shouting. Laughing the whole time, we would look up the words and then voice their meaning. At the end of the lesson, I can’t imagine what people must have thought about the sound effects coming from our cubicle or the laughter that accompanied it.