2 Understanding what you hear without subtitles

As you will have already seen, the video clips shown here come with subtitles. There are times when this is very helpful for your learning, as they can support your understanding if you haven’t heard a word or phrase clearly, or if the speaker mumbles. However, there are also times when subtitles can be a distraction, as it can be tempting to read the words shown on the screen, rather than listen carefully to the speakers. To test this, you will now complete some activities without using the subtitles.

Here you meet the von der Osten family. They were asked a similar set of questions to Henning Haarhaus and all the other people you are meeting on this course.

Figure 9 The von der Osten family.