Long ago, back in the distant year of 2013, I met some Albanians students at university. What surprised me is that I, very ignorantly, knew little about their culture and absolutely nothing about their language. On the other hand, they knew a lot about the Italian language and culture. One of the girls I met spoke Italian at a pretty good conversational level. The others who didn't speak as well, would still know some phrases or vocab that I would not imagine coming from somebody who didn't speak Italian. In fact, when I ended up visiting Albania this summer, I met more Albanians that spoke Italian instead of those that spoke English. Hell, they had perfect pronunciation and knew as much vocab as somebody who had at some point taken Intro to Italian for a year in college. Why? Beautiful Albania, and it really is beautiful (shh... don't tell anyone), is very close to Italy. Growing up, Albanian millennials would watch Japanese cartoons, dubbed in Italian, just as we had done in Italy. So, whether it was Dragonball Z, Mila e Shiro, or Olly e Benji, we shared this Adriatic-Nipponic connection with our neighbors.
It became part of our culture growing up, the cartoons in the morning and after school. The difference though, is that us Italians weren’t learning another language because we dub everything. In fact, us Italians, have an English speaking deficiency. We're are amongst the worst in Europe, closely following France and Spain...
So, if you haven’t spotted enough red herrings, what I’m trying to get at is that we should all be like Albanians, going to the beach and enjoying beautiful mountains. Just kidding. Rather, we can learn a lot by something that happened to them: passive language learning. Movies, tv-shows, anime, cartoons, and comic books are all excellent resources for learning languages. Why? They focus on dialogue. What is important 99% of the time, is dialogue. Languages are for conversing, for getting your point across to somebody and meeting their mind halfway on the road to yours. Dialogue, through speech, accents, body language, and emotion. All of this is something that a grammar textbook can hardly teach you. “The cat is on the table.” In terms of daily utility, these grammar textbook sentences are lacking. Nobody speaks like that. An episode of a TV show, on the other hand, is comprised mainly of conversation with others. They use slang, proverbs, sayings, and body language which will help you learn to communicate in your target language. You will learn the correct pronunciation of words, common formulations of sentences. You will learn to speak, even when there’s little opportunity to practice with natives.
Pick a tv-show or movie you think you might like. Watch it with subtitles and jot down the times in which the speakers say a sentence you might want to learn. E.g. @ 43 minutes and 12 seconds Hakan speaks. Do this for 10-20 sentences. Re-watch the movie going through your time stamps and copy down the sentence you want to learn. It helps to pick something you can use in real life: e.g. “hey babe can I buy you a drink?” Own discretion is advised… Do this for all the sentences. Listen carefully and repeat imitating pronunciation. Make sense of the grammar and if you really don’t get it ask for help from a native speaker using conversationexchange.com like I mentioned in my previous blog post. Finally, watch the scene without subtitles, and see how much more you understand. You’ll be surprised by how much you’ve picked up!
Pro-tip: If you have Netflix, you’re in luck. There’s a chrome addon called language learning with Netflix. With it, you can watch your shows with subtitles in your native language and your target language at the same time. Not only that, you can hover your mouse over the subtitle and get dictionary definitions of words you don’t know. You can rewind or skip to the previous or next subtitle. And this is all free. If you were to buy language learning with Netflix (and it’s cheap), you can save phrases to your notebook and practice them later and do much more. Personally, I am a strong believer in the analogue pen and paper addon to our brain i.e. using our physical environment as well a virtual one. But, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Pro-pro-tip: once you have copied these sentences down, make some spaced repetition flashcards with Anki or Memrise (I will dedicate a full blog post to these incredible apps in the future). This way you directly and seamlessly incorporate your film watching with your learning.
So, long story short:
1. Pick a movie, tv-show, animated series in your target language.
2. Watch it with subtitles in your native language, mark down the times in which you hear sentences you want to learn.
3. Go back and copy these sentences down, understand them and practice them.
4. Repeat.
Note that, a movie is long. A tv-show is long. Work in small chunks. It should still be fun. It will take too long to go through a whole movie and stopping every 3 minutes to jot down a sentence. Work segment by segment in different sittings.
As always, happy learning.
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