Language learning takes a lot of time and commitment, so it’s not surprising that learners often look for ways to combine learning with fun. One example of this is watching foreign films. But can a leisure activity like that really help with language learning? Following three days of immersion in the Japan Foundation’s 2019 film festival, here’s my suggestion of five ways that watching foreign films can help your language learning.
Slang and dialects
If you’ve learned a language a while ago and don’t use it regularly in the country where it’s spoken, you might find that the phrases you were taught are a bit out of date. Thinking back to the French of my school days, I guess that phrases like “chouette” and “dans le vente”, which were included in printed textbooks 40 years ago, are probably not the first choice of modern-day French residents.
When I was learning Japanese in Japan in 2006, people said “honto da?” (really?) a lot in conversation. From watching more recent Japanese films, I can hear that’s been replaced by “maji da?” (seriously?).
In addition, where films are set in a location with a particular accent, you’ll get to hear how that sounds, giving you a better chance of understanding it if you ever go there in real life (Think of all the non-native English speakers watching “The Full Monty” or “Trainspotting”). If you’re really lucky, the accent will be highlighted in a way that will help you to pick out the differences. The film “The Maiko is a Lady”, for example, featured a character who had to be taught the local Kyoto dialect used by geisha, so other characters were explicitly telling her “Don’t say “sumimasen” (excuse me), say “sunmahen”.
Vocabulary in context
Unless you’re relying solely on Duolingo and learning purely through sentences, at some point you’ve probably learned words in isolation e.g. “shoujiki” is “honest”. Watching a film, you get to expand that vocabulary by hearing natural ways that you can apply it e.g. “shoujiki” is used a lot at the beginning of phrases to mean something like “honestly” or “to be honest”, which you wouldn’t guess just from seeing it in the dictionary.
You’ll be able to pick up usages which are more common for certain types of people (or consolidate usage that you’ve already been told). For example, there seems to be at least one meal in every film of this festival, and each time the female characters say that the food is “oishii” (delicious), while the male characters say “umai” (skilled – presumably aimed more at the chef than the food).
Vocabulary and grammar refresh
There are probably words and phrases that you’ve learned but never really used in speech. Hearing them on screen will bring them to your attention, remind you that they exist as an option, and show you what kind of context they can be used in. All of these will increase the odds that you can carry this vocabulary over from passive to active use next time you’re speaking in your target language. For example, although I’d learned the phrase “tanomu kara” (Because I request it…), I never used it myself until I’d heard it repeated a few times in films. It’s a way of saying you’re asking for something as a favour, which isn’t very intuitive to a native English speaker. Hearing that kind of phrase enough times to make it feel intuitive is a good way to become able to use it.
Extension of vocabulary and grammar
As a non-native speaker of your target language, you probably have certain phrases and constructions that you favour over others, simply because they’re easier to remember in the first place, or because you’ve used them so much that they’ve become a habit. For example, to say someone can do something, I tend to use verb + koto ga dekimasu instead of using the potential verb form, because I can use koto ga dekimasu with any verb I already know. For the potential form, I need to know what type of verb it is, identify the potential stem and then add the relevant ending onto it, which makes it a bit more complicated. However, watching films I can tell that the potential form is much more common, which gives me a bit of motivation to learn it properly (with this guide, if you’re interested).
Furthermore, by chance there may be a word used in more than one film, which you feel inspired to look up after you find yourself hearing it repeatedly. At this festival, I caught the word “manzoku” several times in more than one of the films being shown, which made it stand out and encouraged me to research it when i got home (it means “satisfied”, apparently; I’ll have to watch a few more films to get how to use it in context).
Listening practice
This last point isn’t guaranteed, and it does require a bit extra effort from you. If you can focus your eyes on the top half of the screen, so that you can hear the spoken language before you read the subtitles, then you will get some listening practice, with the added benefit of being able to check what you heard so that you don’t miss any of the film’s meaning. However, it doesn’t work the other way round. If you read the subtitles as (or even before) you listen, it will probably help you to make sense of what you’re hearing and make it easier for you to mentally recreate what’s being said, but it won’t make a difference to your ability to understand the spoken language without subtitles.
To summarise, I’d say watching films is good for consolidating and refreshing vocabulary, but unlikely to promote a lot of new vocabulary learning. Do you use films as part of your learning technique? How useful do you find them?
Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash