Can your language learning be helped by watching films?
The short answer is yes. Lots of people still have DVDs and our sixth New Year’s tip shows how they can help you improve your language skills.
The image here is from the back of a DVD. The audio is available in 3 languages, English, French and German. Subtitles are available in 11 languages.
To improve your listening and reading skills, put the audio and subtitles to your target language. As you will have seen the DVD before, you know the story. Listen to the audio and follow with the subtitles. It’s amazing how much your vocabulary will improve if you do this regularly. Jot down the words that you hear regularly in your language notebook. This is especially useful if you like a type of films for example crime dramas. The same language will come up again and again. In this way watching films helps you to learn the language. For an even bigger challenge when you are ready, take away the subtitles and solely focus on the audio.
There are now lots of entire films available on sites like youtube and you can turn on the automatic subtitles. They aren’t as accurate as the subtitles on a DVD but still a very useful learning resource. Don’t forget arts cinemas show foreign language films regularly. What kind of films do you watch to help you learn a language?