How To Learn A Foreign Language Through Movies
Lots of students seem to believe that watching movies is a great way to improve their foreign language
. It can be so, but only if you have the appropriate level of it, and you are ready to "work" with the movie, not just casually watch it with the mother language subtitles on.
Watching a film with subtitles will not improve your foreign language. There is a way to work with movies: it's a lot of work, it's tedious and time consuming, but you will learn a lot.
How to choose the movie
Many people think they don't understand the movie because they don't know the vocabulary. Well, it is obviously true if you are a beginner, or have selected a movie with a lot of slang and expressions that are not common. But my experience is that most of the time, the culprit is not so much the vocabulary as the sound quality. Students don't understand well because they cannot hear well. So take all this into account when you choose your movie, and prefer slow paced stories with dialogues between 2 actors indoors.
Actually, picking a movie you already know will help you understand it better, so it's not a bad idea at all.
Choose movies with soundtracks and subtitles. That's the best. However, don't get frustrated: often the subtitles don't exactly match the dialogues. It happens, but it's a very small percentage of the dialogues.
How to study with movies
Watch the movie without subtitles. Listen to a sentence or 2, and try to write the dialogue down. If you succeed, great, move to the next 2 sentences.
If you cannot do it, rewind and repeat at least 4 times. If you still don't get it, write what you hear, phonetically. Then check the subtitles and figure out what they said
Analyze why you didn't understand.
a) If you didn't know the word, did you get the sound right? If you did, that's already a victory! Can you guess what it means with the scene? If not, go check the subtitles. Then repeat the sentence out-loud, trying to mimic the actor. Then write down the new words of vocabulary in a notebook, in 2 columns: on one side. Later, test yourself: look at the word and see if you can come up with it.
b) If you couldn't understand the actor, then listen to the sentence very carefully, and repeat out loud, trying to mimic exactly the actor. Figure out how you would have said it, and compare it to the way they said it. If it's a common word/sentence, write it down in a notebook and try to write how the actor pronounced it. Later, test yourself to see if you can read the word or combination of words correctly.
Using this method and great progress will be made. It's a lot of work, but the results are outstanding. If you feel that movies are too hard, start by challenging your understanding with longer audio recordings.
Finally, it's not because the movie is in foreign
languages that you have to do all this hard work: there are many good movies that should be enjoyed for the story and the film making, with the mother language subtitles on, not for language learning purposes.
Work and leisure, you should have them both in your life.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier
translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
by: carmen
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