How does watching movies in English help you with your English

 

English Learners have a big advantage over learners of other languages:

Hollywood is in America and  it makes English-language movies. So, if you know English and you like movies, why don’t you watch movies in English? You can have fun and , at the same time , learn a lot of English.

Watching a dubbed film will never be as good as watching the original version. Why? Because in the original version , the actor’s voice are real. Everything is just like the director imagined.

 

Why watch movies in english

þ     First you get lots of correct English sentences into your head. Then you can imitate them and you can make your own sentences.

þ     You learn what words they use. When native speakers use words and phrases that you often won’t find in a book. Spoken language is different from “Book language” .

þ     Movies also let you learn informal and slang words which are not yet in English dictionaries

þ     You learn how they say these words. Movies let you improve your pronunciation

, not only grammar and vocabulary. If you listen to Americans and Britons speaking English , you can learn to speak like them.

þ     You learn to understand spoken language . movies are made for native speakers, not for learners of English . So the actors talk fast , just like native speakers talk in real life.

 

The difficulty of watching movies

 

This is one big problem with movies: They are much more difficult to understand than books. If you don't understand a word in a book, you can simply look it up in a dictionary, because the word is written there (you know its spelling). With a movie, you sometimes hear something, but you don't know what it is. Sometimes you don't even know if you've heard one word or two. There are other reasons why listening is more difficult than reading, and they all mean one thing: If you want to understand a movie, you have to know a lot of English words — and not only their spelling, but also their pronunciation.

 

What to do when you don't understand something

If you are playing the movie from tape or DVD, you can stop it whenever you don't understand a sentence. You can then play the sentence many times and try to look up words in a dictionary (which is not easy, because you have to guess the spelling!).

Most DVDs let you turn on subtitles. With subtitles, it is easy to look up difficult words in your dictionary, because you know the spelling.

Now the most important thing: You first read the explanations; then you watch the movie. So, when you're watching the film, you already know the necessary vocabulary!

I think this is the best strategy for watching movies, because:

·             It feels great to understand a movie in the original! It's very, very motivating when you learn a word, and then the knowledge of the word lets you enjoy the movie. It gives you a lot of pleasure — so you will want to learn more English vocabulary to understand even more.

·             You don't have to stop the movie. (Or you have to stop it less frequently.) You can simply watch it and enjoy it.

Learning techniques

What else can you do to learn from movies more effectively? The same things that you should do when reading books:

  1. Pay attention to interesting things: new words, phrases, and grammar structures.
  2. Use your dictionary to learn about these interesting things. You can stop the movie to look up difficult words. You can also write down all the interesting sentences, and look them up later. But do use your dictionary!
  3. Add these interesting things to SuperMemo. you can add all the sentences in the guide to your SuperMemo collection — before watching the film. Later, you can also add the words that you have written down when watching the movie.

Where to get movies in English?

·             Your cable or satellite TV may have movie channels in English (for example, Channel 2 from Arab Satellite is a popular channel which shows a lot of movies every day.

·             You can buy DVDs or videotapes (don’t forget  there is not any copyright law in our country and then you can buy a original DVD or Videotape very cheap)

·             In some Cinemas show films with subtitles in the local language (and not dubbed movies). It is a good idea to watch (just like Farhang cinema)

 

 

Mohammd Hassan Adjigol

21 Feb 2005