Is Learning English Grammar through Movies Really That Effective?

For fellow English learners, being able to understand English by watching movies or series could be a very interesting premise. How is it not, all you have to do is just sit down on a couch and enjoy a lot of movies that you like. Then, after a decent amount of time doing it, English skills pop up in your head and you suddenly have the ability to speak the language fluently with proper grammar. Seems pretty pleasant, right? Unfortunately, that is not the case. If you are a beginner, learning English through movies would leave you confused as you could not understand anything in the movies. Let’s dive into this popular learning method, and see its effectiveness.

Many people might assume that learning a language through movies is a passive activity and does not take so much effort. While it could be very helpful to get used to the language, the true benefit could only be obtained when you do active activities about it, such as hyper-focusing on the movies, taking notes when finding unfamiliar vocabulary, reviewing what you learned, analyzing the grammar, etc.

As I mentioned earlier, you would only get confused when learning English through movies as a beginner. However, for the intermediate and advanced levels, watching movies could be very helpful in sharpening language skills. So, it is important to know the goals and focus for those 3 levels:

For Beginner Level

The goal you should aim for as a beginner is to maintain your interest and motivation in learning your target language. You should be focusing on pronunciation, tone, rhythm, and simple words. You will not understand anything, but you will get an idea of how the language is spoken. This would be a good starting point to learn English as you may learn new words that are frequently used.

For Intermediate Level

The objective for the intermediate level is to practice sentences in context. Now, you can start to focus on sentence structure, grammar, and short expressions. This way, you will grow your ability to structure sentences correctly. Your understanding of how to use some of the sentences you have learned will also increase.

For Advanced Level

Once you are capable of understanding roughly 70-80% of the movies, aim to immerse yourself in the language and practice speaking like a native. Focus on expanding your vocabulary, learning authentic and colloquial expressions, and understanding unfamiliar idioms. At this level, it is not effective to learn something new from movies as you already understand most of the content. But it is good for maintaining your comprehension.

You need to understand that watching movies should not be your main method of learning English, as it takes a lot of time to receive some new information on a surface level. It would be overwhelming if you try to understand the dialog meaning word by word throughout the movie, leading you to only learn something new in a small amount.

Obviously, movies will not explain to you the theory of grammar usage. Thus, if you want to achieve deep comprehension in learning English, especially in grammar, the traditional learning method, which is through textbooks, is still necessary.

However, for everyday conversation purposes, where small grammar error is tolerated but still significant. Movies would help you with several advantages compared to textbooks, such as:

Movies use more natural English 

Compared to textbooks, movie dialogue is closer to what you will hear in everyday conversation, this will help you improve your spoken English.

Textbooks often give you stiff dialogue, for example:

“Hi, how are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you, and you?”

Which sounds odd when you say it in everyday life. Whereas movie dialogue uses more flexible language that can be applied in conversation, for instance:

“Hey, how’s work?”

“Well, it’s so-so, what about you?”

Movies provide more context

Textbooks usually provide you with vocabulary lists, but rarely demonstrate how to use those words properly. On the other hand, movies will give you context and how words are used in a sentence, leading you to expand your vocabulary with more understanding.

For instance, the word “bat” could mean a nocturnal animal or a stick to hit a ball in baseball. When watching a movie about baseball, and there is someone in the movie says “he is throwing his bat!”, we will know that the “bat” in this context refers to a stick. Movies might also provide various ways of using the word “bat” in different sentences.

 

Movies show you how things are said

As audio and visual content, Movies will help you to get an idea of how people say words and phrases. Not only the pronunciation, but also the body language, tone, expression, and rhythm. Which are crucial to make people understand what we are trying to say. Oftentimes, the same word with different stressed syllables could have completely different meanings.

In conclusion, watching movies is a pleasant way to learn English for everyday conversation with many advantages compared to learning through textbooks. Your goal and focus should be different depending on your fluency level. However, if you want to understand grammar at a deep level, movies might not be as effective as textbooks. You cannot only rely on movies, gaining language knowledge from other resources such as books and lessons is still needed.

Sources:

Youtube - elysse daVega : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xXjI6gI3nk&t=45s

Youtube - Zoe.languages : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rM-rrMPmD0&t=156s

Baggio Wong | Learn English Through Movies and Film | FluentU