Happy Monday to all. I hope you all had a good weekend and may we have a successful week ahead.
I can understand Yoruba but I can’t speak it fluently so I’m more inclined to watch Yoruba movies & listen to Yoruba music. I’ve tried to do the same with Hausa & Igbo and other native African movies/music but I just don’t understand what they are saying. Some even have subtitles but, the subtitles at times just don’t make sense. Even though I don’t understand Asian anime/manga, they usually do English dub versions which makes it look as if the actors/actresses are speaking in English rather than the anime/manga’s native language. At times they make mistakes as well. However, I’m yet to find the same solution for Hausa/Igbo movies/music and other native African tribes as well. So am I being tribalistic/xenophobic by not going out of my way in order to learn these other native languages or is it Nollywood and/or Technology’s fault that there aren’t great language-translation apps in order to help me out?
Back in JSS 1-3 we were taught Hausa, Igbo & Yoruba. I used to fail all those language classes and looked down on all of them. Even the native movies/music, I ignored them at first but then years later, I started watching Nigerian movies when I heard of IrokoTV. Just like how one of my favorite rappers is Jay-Z but at the same time I didn’t know who Shawn Corey Carter was (in person), one of my best CEOs is CEO Jason (@Jason_Igwe_Njoku) although I don’t know who Jason Chukwuma Njoku is (in person). This article made me admire him more.
Then down the line IrokoTV made this move and I couldn’t watch movies in my browser. I was never a paid member (because I never had the money) so I was cool with the ads. I never used an ad-blocker because I understood that we all gotta eat to survive. But because of the adjustment I had to go from IrokoTV to this. Yes I downloaded the mobile app at first, but I’ve never been an app fan so I deleted it. I always use the respective blogs/websites in my browser instead of having to download an app. The only reason I gave IrokoTV a chance is because I thought IrokoTV would’ve solve the language-translation problem that I have, but up till this day I still haven’t found a solution. With the desktop version, I was still optimistic that I might find a chrome extension that could do language-translation for me.
Is there any good/great language-translation apps/startups out here that I don’t know of but someone can suggest? Or should I just stop being lazy and go ahead and learn two or more languages in order to watch movies and hear music?