How Can You Use Movies or TV Shows In Your Second Language To Enhance Your Listening Skills?

People often think that you need to learn the language, then you can watch TV and movies and while that may make sense …it’s not true.

Watching TV shows and movies is actually a great way to enhance your listening skills and generally learn the language.

You should be doing this from an early stage and I will go through some ways you can do this to really boost your listening ability in your new language.

Just Watch The TV Shows And Movies …It’s Immersion

When you take a step back and look at what TV shows and movies are, you will quickly see that they are just a form of material you can use for your language studies.

I have talked a lot on this site about the power of immersion and movies and TV fit this box perfectly.

All you need to do is just watch them and your listening skills will increase. Of course just blindly watching things you don’t understand is pretty pointless; you need it to be comprehensible. I will go through some things you can do below to make the movies you are watching more comprehensible, so you can actually make progress.

However, the principle is really just as simple as take the time to watch TV shows and movies. They will help you enhance your skills. 

(You can read more about – Can Watching Movies In A New Language Help With Learning?)

Watch A Lot Of TV and Movies In Your New Language To Help With Your Listening 

When it comes to immersion, you need to do a lot of it, every day …which means you need to be watching a lot of TV and movies.

Exactly how much you need to watch will depend on many things, such as your current level in the language and even what language it is you are learning, but I think everyone is in agreement that more you do the better.

I would honestly aim for a few hours a day, so you are probably going to have to sacrifice a few things, but the reward will of course be an increase in your listening skills and an overall increase in your language abilities. 

Also, watching TV shows and movies isn’t exactly a huge chore, so I’m sure making some sacrifices isn’t going to be hard. I would just suggest you stop watching content in your native language, which should easily free up a few hours each evening for you to dedicate to your new language.

Watch Movies With A lot Of Dialogue To Help With Your Listening

This may sound like common sense, but it is easy to forget. You can easily end up watching a 90 minute movie and really only listen to a small amount of dialogue.

Action movies can be particular bad for this. There may be a huge fight scene or car chase and while these are awesome … no one is talking, so you are not practicing your listening skills.

You want to find TV shows and movies that are dense with dialogue. The more speaking there is …the more you are listening and the more you are training your abilities in the language.

Watch The Same Movies Multiple Times To Help With Your Listening

Language learning is often about repetition, which means it can be very sensible to watch the same movies many times.

You might think this is boring, which it can be at times, but you will actually pick up new things every time you watch something.

As I have already mentioned above, you need to understand what you are watching and it needs to be comprehensible. Watching the same thing over and over is going to provide you with this. You will know the context and the general idea of what is happening, simply because you have already seen it before.

Even if you don’t understand a lot of what is being said, you will still find you understand more the second or third time you watch it, simply as you have more context from seeing it before. 

You will also just get comfortable with what you are watching, which again can help start to understand what is going on as you get more and more familiar with things.

There are no real rules for how many times you should repeat something. Some people can’t do it, other may repeat it a couple of times, and a few will just watch things over and over again hundreds of times. Just do whatever feels comfortable and if you are still getting something from it, keep doing it.   

Watch Movies You Have Already Seen Before In Your Own Language

On a similar vein as repeating movies over and over again is to just watching movies you have seen before in your own language.

These will be movies you might not have seen in a while but you will still remember roughly what is going on, which means you will have some context and a general comprehension of what is going on.

A good idea is to check your current DVD collection. It will say on the back of the box what languages the movie is in. They usually have a number of different audio tracks, and hopefully it will be in the language you are learning.

I wouldn’t worry about subtitles, as these are going to be mixed with your native audio …so you are not going to be reading them, you will just hear your native language. Just focus on the audio tracks for the language you are learning.

Also, your DVDs are probably going to naturally be in your native language, if you are an English speaker like me, it can be very strange to see famous Hollywood actors now speaking with a totally different voice, in a different language. It gets less weird with time, just try and ignore it and focus on the language.

(You can read more about – What Is Comprehensible Input In Language Learning?)

Watch Kids Movies To Help With Your Listening Skills

When you are first starting out in your language, you will not understand much because your vocabulary will not be that strong.

An easy way to overcome this is to watch kids movies. These will generally be a lot easier to watch as the language is going to be fairly simple. You will also find that it is very easy to get the context of what is going on, there is usually all sorts of crazy visual on the screen that can help you make sense of things; it’s not just two people talking back and forth. 

Kids movies are a great place to start your listening immersion, even if they are a little …well, childish. Focus on these for a while and you will see your general confidence and listening skills go up.

(You can read more about – How To Find Comprehensible Input For Language Learning)

Subtitles Can Help Your Listening In Your New Language

Subtitles can give you huge boost to your listening ability as now you can see and hear the language at the same time. Your brain is getting double the information and it will help you make sense of things.

It is important that the subtitles are in the same language you are learning, so you want the audio and the subtitles to match. Watching movies with subtitles in your own language is going to be a waste of time as you will just read these and ignore the audio …which defeats the point of listening.

You can have your native language subtitles on once, just to be able to watch the movie through and give you some context and an understanding of the story, although, I would just read a quick synopsis, rather than sitting through the whole movie.

It is also important that you don’t rely too heavily on the subtitles, as it will eventually help your reading more than your listening. For a beginner it is fine, but try and wean yourself of them as soon as you can.

It is harder to listen without subtitles, but that is how talking to real people works …you don’t have subtitles when you are stood in front of someone, so you have to get used to not using them at some point.        

Try Studying One Scene To Help With Your Listening Skills

TV shows and movies can be quite long and while this is fine as you can get a decent chunk of immersion time under your belt, it always isn’t ideal to study like this.

It can be easier to break things down and go one scene at a time.

It can be nice to just watch 1 scene and study it intensely until you understand every last bit of it. This would be where you look up every word you don’t know or double check grammar and basically go through the scene line by line until you have really nailed down what is being said.

This in itself may take you an hour just to go through 5 minutes of footage. However, the next time you watch this scene …it will be as clear as day.

If you take a movie and break it up like this over a month, really focusing on it chunk by chunk, you are going to have a very strong knowledge of this film. After doing this, try and watch the film all the way through and you will be amazed at how advanced your listening skills feel.

(You can read more about – How Important Is It To Listen To Authentic Native Material In A Second Language?)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that movies and TV shows should be helping you learn the language and should be something you are doing early on …not waiting until you have a good level first.

Just take your time and go through the same material a few times and really pay attention to it. It can be a bit intense and it will be hard work, but the end result will be that your listening skills are through the roof and so will your confidence, let alone the fact that you can just sit back and enjoy the movies at the same time as you are studying. 

(You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Listening In A Language You Are Learning)