I keep having this problem with foreign languages. I learned Norwegian – a little in Minnesota, a little in Oslo. Then I moved to Trondheim and discovered that nobody outside of Oslo speaks the nice standard Norwegian that you learn in class. Some of the people I worked with might as well have been speaking Icelandic, for all I understood.

Then I moved to Japan. I learned Japanese. And I rapidly discovered that there was a local dialect in Kumamoto, too, and the farther I got out of the city, the more incomprehensible it got. My Japanese is pretty good, but with an old person in the countryside? Forget about it.

Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about how we adapt to unfamiliar pronunciations and dialects. The way to do it, or at least the way they did it in this study: Watch movies with subtitles in the foreign language.

It’s always kind of annoyed me that when you buy a foreign movie on DVD in the U.S., it doesn’t come with subtitles in the language of the movie. (Unless the movie is in English, French, or Spanish.) And now I have scientific backing for my annoyance! Because I don’t think watching “The Lives of Others” with Spanish subtitles is going to help me improve my German. The German subtitles exist – they have to be written for closed-captioning – and it must cost basically nothing to include another set of subtitles on a DVD. Somebody should start a campaign.

Another thing that would be helpful: subtitles in real life. It sure would be handy if I could walk up to someone in, say, Bergen and have the words the person is saying appear in the air.