Watching foreign language movies (or listening to music or reading books) has long been a way for students to learn a new language, and many language instructors show movies in the target language as a means of helping their students learn. Foreign language experts recommend watching movies or television in the target language as a way to improve language skills, with the following benefits in mind:

• Native speakers can be heard and imitated.
• The rhythm and sound of the language becomes familiar
• Grammar and vocabulary are used in a natural context
• The student is immersed in the language for extended periods of time.
• It's an entertaining and fun way to learn.

Now that familiar English language movies are readily available with foreign language audio tracks through DVD and other digital formats, foreign language enthusiasts can take advantage of this technology to improve their language acquisition and to learn Spanish and other languages more quickly and easily than ever before.

But before you turn on the television to a Spanish station or sit down to watch your favorite movie using the Spanish audio track, you may want to consider a couple of things. While there is some benefit to watching movies and trying to pick out familiar words, it is easy to become overwhelmed as the wave of unintelligible, indistinct, and meaningless syllables crashes over you. It's also not very efficent: You can spend many hours listening to a lot of dialogue and come away with only small gains in understanding. That could be boring and frustrating, but it wouldn't be if you could progress more rapidly--and mark the progress you've made.

Our approach helps you solve these problems. For instance, let's take a line from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The untrained ear hears something like what the eye sees here:

             Mevoyatenerquehacerunpeludosombrerodecastor

But if you already know this:
          
           me voy a: I'm gong to
           tener que: to have to
           hacer: to make
           un: a, an, one
           peludo: furry
           sombrero: hat
           de: of, from
           castor: beaver

You will hear this:

           Me voy a tener que hacer un peludo sombrero de castor.

And understand this:

           I'm going to have to make a furry hat out of that beaver.
              (Lit, I'm going to have to make a furry hat of beaver)

It's that simple! But, while you could start with this stage, and many have, we recommend that you take care of two preliminary steps. (1) Learn the basics of Spanish with a text, audio, video, or computer program--immersion is best, and (2) Master the 600 words that make up 80% of everyday Spanish. We talk about these below.