Want to Learn English with Movies? Here is What You Need to Know

If you want to improve your English, just watching movies in English doesn’t work. Watching movies is a passive activity. Learning is active and requires a different level of engagement. Am I saying that you’re probably not watching movies “the right way”? I know that sounds funny, but if you don’t have a strategy and the right mentality, you will waste a lot of time just staring at a screen and not learning much at all. So, watch this video to learn how to engage with media and use it as a language learning tool. Spoiler: It means pausing, rewinding, and actually taking notes! Also, leave a comment and let me know about your experience with English movies. https://www.engvid.com/why-just-watch...

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In this lesson:
0:00 Why not just watch English movies?
2:09 Give the movie your full attention
3:04 Pause & rewind
4:58 Use subtitles
7:52 Take notes
9:59 Watch 3-5 minute clips
11:15 Passive listening?

Transcript:
How often have you heard to improve your English? Just watch English movies. This advice is given by other English learners and by English teachers just like me to students like you. Now, this is not bad intentioned advice. We give this advice because I genuinely believe that movies are a good way to help people improve their vocabulary, their pronunciation, their grammar skills. There are many, many benefits to watching films, to watching media in your target language, in this case, English. However, this advice, just watch movies, is not really complete. There are two reasons for this. Uh number one, when you watch a movie in your first language, it is a passive practice, right? You don't watch movies when to hyperfocus on something because you want to learn something. You watch movies because it's pleasurable, it's entertainment, and you want to be taken on an emotional journey or to experience a story. The other issue with this is that today's modern movie watching is much different than it was in the past. Most people today when they sit down on the couch to watch a movie usually have their phone in their hand and they might have a bag of popcorn in the other. So they're not really focused 100% on the movie unless the movie is really good. Uh, so does that sound like a good way to improve your language skills in a second language, to be passive and to be distracted? I don't think so. So, the point of this video is for me to teach you how to watch movies the right way. And today, I really want to show you why just watch English movies doesn't work unless you do these things. First of all, if you are watching a movie or a show, you need to give it your full attention. So, this means remove distractions, right? Put your phone away. Put that granola bar away so you're not focusing on chewing and eating. Focus on the content. Listen actively to what characters are saying and pay attention to the context. what is happening in the movie? What are the relationships between the characters? Basically, don't just have it on in the background while you are washing the dishes or vacuuming the floor or if you're doing something else around the house. You need to give a movie if you are using it for learning, you need to give it your full attention. Next, you need to pause and rewind. Remember, you are engaging with the movie not as a source of entertainment but as a learning resource. So, think of the movie as a text. If you read the text and you don't understand something, usually you go back and you read it again. Maybe you use a translator to figure out what was said. So, when you pause and rewind, you can use this as an opportunity to listen. actively and repeat what you heard. Repeat what characters say. Um, I do this when I watch Stranger Things on Netflix, for example. I will pause, I will go back and I will try to say what the characters say because I heard something that I understand the majority of, and I can try to figure out what they mean first through context. So, yeah, learn through context. that is the next point. Uh, I kind of understand the situation and I think, "Ah, maybe this word means this," and if I don't understand it then I grab my phone, not distracted but using it as a tool, and I look up the translation of a word for example. "Oh that's what that means. Okay, let's watch this scene again," even if it's just 5 seconds or 10 seconds of a conversation. Basically, when you are watching movies in a new language, you try to get the big picture. You won't understand everything and that's okay. It is not realistic for you to understand everything in a new language. It's a new language, right? So, there is something else you can do. If it's really tough for you to understand what characters are saying, use subtitles. […]