W

atching 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.
Click here to find out more.
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)