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Learning language through movies.


falcon001

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When you have some basic knowledge about a particular language, it's easier to learn though movies and TV show than any other means as they teach you how to pronounce a word an when to use a particular word.

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Guest wellpostlooper

It's really interesting that people can learn like this. I remember in the first Transformers Movie, Optimus Prime (the hero robot) said that they had acquired their knowledge of our language "from the world wide web". I wish it was this easy to just download the languages we need. Till then, I am learning Spanish from movies so I guess we will have to learn the hard way.

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Although I'm not yet fluent in any languages other than English, I watch a lot of foreign movies and soap operas.  I think it's a good idea to look at movies in the language that you are trying to learn.  A friend of mine from Puerto Rico told me that she learned English by watching TV and game shows in English. 

I learn quite a few words in other languages when watching foreign movies and shows, and I learn pronunciation as well.

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When I studied in Europe for a year I first took an intensive language course over the summer.  Part of the class was to listen to news reports and figure out what they were saying.  In the beginning it was very difficult and we had to listen several times to finally understand them, but as we learned to understand better then we could understand much more easily.  This gave us practice with real language not someone slowing down so we could get it.  It was a wake up call how much I couldn't understand at first, but a real confidence booster that I could understand it in the end.

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What are some good Spanish movies to check out? I am unfamiliar with just about every Spanish actor and actress. I imagine it would be a pretty challenging way to pick up a language, but since I know most of the language I think it would be a good test for me. To see if I could follow what's going on in the movie.

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I learned English mostly through movies. I think that movies are a great source of new words and the proper way to form a sentence. Unfortunately, most movies lack good grammar, but movies enrich our vocabulary, so it's important to watch movies while learning the language you want to learn.

It is a good source of learning a new language, I am also learning Korean by watching movies, though some of their dialect differs depending on what part of Korea they are  from, but so far the movies have been helpful.

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I must say that movies have really improved my English. I've learnt a lot of vocabularies through movies and also how to place my words correctly so that they come out well in a manner that people can understand me better.

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I think I'm better at using movies to learn a language when I actually know the words being said - sometimes the actors in the movie are speaking way too quickly for me to even grasp what they're saying, or there are too many words that I don't know said in a row so I can only get the gist of the scene from watching the actions, which is quite difficult.

I find the amount of people that have learned English from watching movies astounding because it's such a hard thing to do for me. I'm really envious. I think I just need to study harder, haha.

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I can say that I have learned some new words from watching movies. I like a movie called Kirikou and the Sorceress, but here, you can only get the DVD that is in Swahili and not the English or French one. From this movie, along with a cartoon called Tinga Tinga, I have been able to pick up and understand quite a number of Swahili words. The grammar in movies may not be exactly perfect for learning precise sentence structures, but they can be very helpful with learning a new language, while also being entertained.

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I couldn't agree with you more. English is not my native language so I basically learned it from watching both English movies, songs and reading novels. They do expand my vocabulary knowledge even up 'til now. The internet is a big help too and ofcourse the dictionary. I learned a lot from chatting as well because most people write in English, it helped me how to converse in English.

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Watching movies and television shows in Spanish helped me learn the language better. Watching movies/shows definitely taught me useful phrases that are used in Spanish society. If anyone else is learning Spanish, I'd recommend watching Pan's Labyrinth. It's heartbreaking, but if you can handle it, you should watch the movie...providing that you haven't seen it yet, because I'm sure that most people have. Also, there are websites that have several shows available for you to watch in Spanish.

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Learning a language through movies is effective to a certain extent. Like one of the posters said, you can easily pick up a few phrases from watching movies. Learning however is limited to that. If one wants to gain conversational fluency, then I believe just watching movies isn't enough in my mind. To gain conversational fluency, one needs to interact more and you can't get that just by watching movies. It's a good supplement, though.

My boss, however, will swear by its effectiveness. His two korean kids basically acquired English through memorization of movie scripts. So when the kids memorize the scripts he would have the two kids say the lines themselves. At least that's the strategy he used with his kids. The kids are now all grown up, but they speak the best English I know.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have heard that people taught themselves English through TV. I find that fascinating. How would you know if you were speaking correctly? Who did you practice on? I understand if you keep hearing a certain word, you will associate it with the picture that's displayed at that time, but who is to say it's right?

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  • 5 years later...

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