ESL Blogs

When trying to learn a new language, there are many tricks you can use in order to help you improve your listening skills and learn plenty of new vocabulary. One of the ways that most people find helpful is adding subtitles to every foreign movie they watch in the language they are trying to learn.

While that might be helpful for some people this doesn’t always apply to everyone. In fact, there are quite a few reasons why you should stop watching your foreign movies without subtitles. Here are some practical reasons why you should start removing them instead.

You’re not really practicing your listening skills

One of the most common reasons why people tend to watch foreign movies is because they want to come more in contact with the way native people speak and get to hear the way that they use certain expressions and words. While that can be a great motive when it comes to learning a new language or even possibly practicing your translation skills, it might not always be the most helpful.

In fact, when you are reading the subtitles below the movie, not only are you not paying enough attention to the scenes, but you are also not really listening to what the actors are saying. You attention is focused on reading and at the same time trying to understand what’s happening so the actual dialogues happening in the movie don’t actually account for much.

As a result, you end up not really listening to what is actually being said but rather listening to what you’re reading. This might seem a little bit confusing, but imagine yourself in a situation where you are met with a local and you have to understand what they’re saying in person, without subtitles. This is where things will start getting tough as you will come to see that you were always so focused on reading the captions that you never managed to get used to the way the people were speaking.

Whether you decide to use captions which are in the same language of the movie or in your own native language, you are still not really helping yourself learn much. Of course, if you are still a beginner in a language, it might just be best for you to practice reading a book or just trying to speak with a teacher or a native before you decide to watch a movie in that language.

If you really want to become better at a language and you wish to understand how the natives speak, the best thing you can do is give yourself enough time and space in order to practice and get a hang of the basics of the language. This way, you will be able to be completely focused on everything that you are hearing and actually manage to learn a lot more than you would if you had switched the subtitles on.

The captions might be incorrect

Another thing that many people don’t take into consideration is that when using translated subtitles for a movie, they don’t always have to be correctly translated. Most of the time people tend to watch movies through pirated websites where people who are not professional translators decide to help out the public and provide translations for various movies and shows.

When a movie is not in your native language, it is way more likely that you won’t be able to understand all the mistakes that might have been made and that will just make your experience with the foreign movie a lot more confusing. When something is translated into a foreign language, there is always a possibility that the translator might just mess some things up.

Even in cases where subtitles might be in the same language as the movie, mistakes can happen and you might end up getting confused over some words or phrases for literally no reason.

The best thing you can do in this case, if you’re still a beginner and need the subtitles to help you understand what’s going on, is to use a reputable streaming service such as Netflix and be certain that the translations will be on point and free of any sorts of mistakes.

It won’t help you become more fluent in the language

Similar to the first point, another reason why many people decide to watch foreign movies with the subtitles on is because they believe that this will help them become a lot more fluent in the language. They believe that since they will be hearing the words and they will be able to understand the meaning, they will be able to recreate the phrases and sentences they hear themselves.

In reality though, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Not only is it difficult to keep up with such a long course of words and sentences, but this is also not a sustainable way to learn how to speak a language. People who have lives abroad in foreign countries always say that the best way to learn a language is to speak it.

No matter how much time you spend listening and reading a language, you will never be able to truly master the accent and the different ways of talking until you actually find yourself in a situation where you have to speak it yourself.

Getting used to a foreign language the right way

So, next time you think that adding subtitles to a movie will help you out, try giving yourself the time you need in order to start understanding each sentence without any aid and you will come to find that this is the best kind of practice in the early stages of learning a new language.

Not only will you be able to pay a lot more attention to the native people’s accents ad usage of native words and phrases but you will also be able to prepare yourself better for any upcoming situations where you will actually have to speak to a native speaker and you won’t have any subtitles to help you out with that.