Poetry

Poetry is the hardest form of listening of all, perhaps. Not so much in distinguishing words, because poetry is often declaimed in a clear voice. But the content is dense. Even reading and understanding poetry in a foreign language is difficult. How does the French student of English cope with Dylan Thomas ?

So we need some extra help. When I started to read French poetry I unashamedly read an English translation first. Understanding not just the individual words, but their use in a poetic context is not easy.

On this page I want to extend the work we're doing with subtitles and audio files. Ideally we want to listen to the poem and watch either the English or French versions - or indeed both together

It's possible, but you need (yet another) video player. This is BS player, which has a free version that you can download here

Set up BS player as follows:-

1. Load the video file in BS Player. They are .wmv - Windows Media Files, so you need to either select BS as the player, or make it the default for this sort of file

2  Pause the video during the initial 'splash screen' and right click on the video to open the Menu.

3  Go down to Subtitles and float the mouse over it to open the sub-menu. You'll see Primary and Secondary.

4. Choose Primary. Select the subtitle file xxx.fr.srt, and select Show subtitle OR select the English xxx.en.srt

5.  If you want, you can select Primary & to Show for the French subtitles, then Secondary & Show to choose xxx.en.srt.  and both subtitles will be displayed, one at the top of the screen, one at the bottom

Finally - if all you want are the French subtitles, just download the French subtitle file and rename from xxx.fr.srt to xxx.srt. Your normal video player will then pick it up

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