How to Learn a New Language When Watching a Movie

There are many ways to learn a language. One way is by watching movies in the new language you want to know. There are some things you need to do before watching these movies, however, to be effective for learning the language. You need to watch the film with subtitles and other distractions like television screens or cell phones. It allows your brain to focus on listening and understanding what is being said in the movie rather than multitask by reading and listening at once without hiring an English tutor. Try watching it again with all of those distractions removed, as they may have been distracting your attention from hearing every word as clearly as possible!

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Choose the Movies You Might Like

Choose TV shows and movies consistently: start with simple words and gradually increase the difficulty. Don’t get the meaning of most of the lines, and then this video is not for you yet. Look for something more straightforward, and then go back to the complex. Children’s films and animation work well for a start. In case you want to watch your favorite movie, watch it in English. It will be much easier to perceive the foreign language version if you already know the plot.

Also, consider the pronunciation and cultural background of the film.Watch films from the United States if you are targeting American English, and if you prefer the British – choose something filmed in England. When you feel confident in one of the variants of the language, fill in the gaps in the knowledge of the other.

Plus, learn from TV shows and movies that you enjoy. This way will increase your motivation and involvement in the educational process and positively affect your results.

Decompose Difficult Dialogues

Rewind and revisit scenes that you cannot understand the first time. Listen to the speech to catch the subtleties of pronunciation. Record the moments that require attention and come back to them after the end of the video if this spoils your viewing pleasure badly, or use the video bookmark feature for that. You can also slow down speech that is too fast by slightly adjusting the playback speed. These options can be found in the viewer’s menu.

Create Your Dictionary

Purposefully study unfamiliar words, not just passively pass videos with or without subtitles through you. Otherwise, the speed of vocabulary replenishment will remain extremely low, even if you start watching a film a day. Write out new words and constructions you hear in the movies, study them, and repeat them regularly. Modern services for expanding vocabulary will help you with this. It will help create a context for what is being said; the chances are that our brains will be better able to process and reproduce those sounds correctly from memory.

If you want to minimize interruptions for writing out words or reading subtitles while watching, learn unfamiliar vocabulary from a particular video in advance.

Basic Proficiency Level is a Must

Without a basic knowledge of grammar and a basic stock of foreign words, it is hardly worth getting to know the language from works of art, and you have to determine your English proficiency level first. You will not be able to isolate the necessary constructions and individual words from the speech you hear and organize them without knowing the rules by which all these elements interact with each other.

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They explain step by step how the language works and form an understanding of its features. Explore a few textbooks or courses, practice the rules and vocabulary learning with exercises, and then continue learning the most common and useful words. Learn common idioms, phrasal verbs, and other structures separately. Only after having received basic knowledge of the language, start learning it through TV series and films.

Wrap Up

The tips listed below should give you an idea of getting started and making learning the most out of it. You can start by picking up one or two phrases that are key vocabulary words in the movie you’re going to watch beforehand so that when they come up, there’s no need to look them up in subtitles!