Listening practice using a DVD

I watched the movie ‘I’m legend’: in the first five minutes there were two characters who spoke about football during a TV show, and then an interview to an important doctor who said about a cure for the cancer.

Step 1

Listening the first five minutes of the film without subtitles I’ve found a lot of problems.

First of all I have understood only disconnected words because the characters spoke too fast and therefore my level of comprehension was low. I’ve realized only the general situation that will be not quite right at the moment of the third step.

Step 2

Listening the first five minutes of the film with English subtitles I’ve understood the context but the characters spoke too fast and therefore I couldn’t understand some parts of the phrases.

Regarding the vocabulary I didn’t know only these words: nutshell, measles, harmful, cancer-free.

Step 3

Listening the first five minutes of the film with English subtitles and stopping every sentence of the subtitles, the comprehension was better because I read and listened every sentence slowly.

Regarding the vocabulary, the meaning of the words wasn’t difficult except the four unknown words.

Reading and listening several time have permitted to repeat the first step more easily.

In conclusion the difficulty was the too fast speech and the fact that a lot of words were linked and they were not pronounced distinctly, and also the presence of the American slang made the understanding more difficult. On the contrary I didn’t have particular problems for the meaning of the worlds.

Here there is the dialog that I didn’t understand at the first step because the two voices were too fast:

-..spring training camp and he's definitely got the inside track. Word is that they're having some 

problems with injuries.

-Really? Are they looking into free-agent signings last second, anything like that?

-Possibly, and they've got a strong farm club too.

They've got some triple-A ballplayers they might bring up.

Peter would certainly be able to tell us more about that.

Who do you like?

So far, I like what I'm seeing in New York. They've got a strong ball club, as usual. 

That's in the American. And in the National, I'm still liking Chicago with a little bit of a twist 

here for Los Angeles.

Okay, so we're looking at New York-Chicago World Series possible Los Angeles. 

Could be a dark horse.

Hold him to it at the end of the season.

That's gonna do it for us from the Sports Desk.

Back to the studio. Thanks, Dave.

Thanks for nothing, Eddie.

Here I understood more because the actress spoke slowly to explain her theory:

Um, I'm not... I find the best way to describe it is, if you can imagine your body as a highway 

and you picture the virus as a very fast car being driven by a very bad man...imagine the damage 

that car could cause.But then if you replace that man with a cop the picture changes. 

And that's essentially what we've done.