from Antimoon.com
English learners have a big advantage over learners of other languages: Hollywood is in America and it makes English-language movies. So, if you know English and you like movies, why don’t you watch movies in English? You can have fun and, at the same time, learn a lot of English.
Why watch movies in English
If you are a fan of movies, you will notice that they are much better in the original. Watching a dubbed film will never be as good as watching the original version. Why? Because in the original version, the actor’s voices are real. Everything is just like the director imagined.
Learning English by watching movies is learning by input. The learning process is similar. First you get lots of correct English sentences into your head. Then you can imitate them and you can make your own sentences. And isn’t that why you are learning English — to be able to make your own sentences? That is why watching movies (just like reading books) is such a great way to learn English.
(You can learn more about how getting correct sentences into your head improves your English in our introduction to input.)
Of course, there are important differences between movies and books. With books, you learn how native speakers write in English. With movies, you learn how they speak English.
- You learn what words they use. When speaking, native speakers use words and phrases that you often won’t find in a book. Spoken language is different from “book language”. For example:
Book: The price of five dollars was acceptable, and I decided to purchase it.
Spoken: It was, like, five bucks, so I was like “okay”.In many movies, the dialog is like real spoken English. Movies also let you learn informal and slang words which are not yet in English dictionaries. For example, in a movie you might hear Give me the freaking keys!, but you won’t find the word freaking in a dictionary.
- You learn how they say these words. Movies let you improve your pronunciation, not only grammar and vocabulary. If you listen to Americans or Britons speaking English, you can learn to speak like them.
- You learn to understand spoken language. Movies are made for native speakers, not for learners of English. So the actors talk fast, just like native speakers talk in real life.
How to learn as much as possible?
The difficulty of watching movies
You won’t learn anything from the movie if you don’t understand it. You probably won’t enjoy it, either. 
This is one big problem with movies: They are much more difficult to understand than books. If you don’t understand a word in a book, you can simply look it up in a dictionary, because the word is written there (you know its spelling). With a movie, you sometimes hear something, but you don’t know what it is. Sometimes you don’t even know if you’ve heard one word or two. There are other reasons why listening is more difficult than reading, and they all mean one thing: If you want to understand a movie, you have to know a lot of English words — and not only their spelling, but also their pronunciation.
You can greatly improve your vocabulary by reading books, looking up words in your dictionary, and repeating them with SuperMemo. But even if you read 200 books in English, you would still not understand everything! There will always be some words that you didn’t know before. And some of the dialog will be spoken very quickly and unclearly. (You should know that sometimes even Americans can’t understand some of the dialog.)
What to do when you don’t understand something
If you are playing the movie from tape or DVD, you can stop it whenever you don’t understand a sentence. You can then play the sentence many times and perhaps you’ll be able to understand all the words in the sentence. If you still don’t understand a word or two, you can try to look them up in a dictionary (which is not easy, because you have to guess their spelling!).
Most DVDs let you turn on subtitles. With subtitles, there is no problem with quick or unclear dialog — everything is just written on the screen. It is also easy to look up difficult words in your dictionary, because you know their spelling.
The problem with subtitles is that they make you lazy — you stop listening and concentrate on reading. This is not good if you want to exercise your listening skills. Therefore, you should probably try to watch movies without subtitles. Turn subtitles on only if you’re having a hard time understanding the sentences in the movie, and it doesn’t help when you listen to them repeatedly.
Movie guides
There is a great alternative to subtitles. ESLnotes.com is a website which has “guides” to popular movies. A guide is a list of over 100 difficult sentences from a movie with explanations. (Here is an example guide to The Graduate.)
Now the most important thing: You first read the explanations; then you watch the movie. So, when you’re watching the film, you already know the necessary vocabulary!
We think this is the best strategy for watching movies, because:
- It feels great to understand a movie in the original! It’s very, very motivating when you learn a word, and then the knowledge of the word lets you enjoy the movie. It gives you a lot of pleasure — so you will want to learn more English vocabulary to understand even more.
- You don’t have to stop the movie. (Or you have to stop it less frequently.) You can simply watch it and enjoy it.
A guide doesn’t explain all the difficult sentences in the movie. But the explanations in the guide should be enough to help you understand what’s happening in the movie.
Learning techniques
What else can you do to learn from movies more effectively? The same things that you should do when reading books:
- Pay attention to interesting things: new words, phrases, and grammar structures.
- Use your dictionary to learn about these interesting things. You can stop the movie to look up difficult words. You can also write down all the interesting sentences, and look them up later. But do use your dictionary!
from Antimoon.com
- Something fun. It needs to be so much fun that you will look forward to reading it every day. It does not have to be intellectual, it does not have to improve your knowledge of science or history. Remember: you want to convince yourself that reading in English is fun. Don’t feel guilty about reading comics, magazines, detective stories, romances, etc. (related article by Stephen Krashen)
- Something challenging, but not too challenging. What does it mean? There should be some words that you don’t know, because you want to learn something. However, there shouldn’t be too many difficult words, because you don’t want to use your dictionary 10 times in one sentence. There’s a simple rule here: If you’re not enjoying the text, switch to an easier one.
- Something with the kind of sentences that you want to write or say yourself. Want to learn to talk about computers in English? Read an English-language forum on computers. When choosing a book, choose one with modern language and lots of dialogue. If you read a book written in obsolete English with lots of literary descriptions, you won’t be able to use too many of these phrases in your own sentences (unless you write books in English). You want useful sentences that you can imitate.
- Start by reading a few books by the same author (or a few books on the same subject). Each author has his/her own vocabulary and grammar. For example, when you read a book by Michael Crichton, you come across a lot of scientific vocabulary. Afterwards, it is easier for you to read another Michael Crichton novel than to read a book by a different author.
When you read another book by the same author, you will notice that you understand it much more easily than the previous one, and you will feel great about your progress in English. On the other hand, if you jump from author to author (or topic to topic), you will always be frustrated by unknown vocabulary and grammar, which is not healthy for your motivation. (related article by Stephen Krashen)
Some ideas
Here are some ideas of texts that you can read in English:
- Literature. Whatever kind of books you like, you can read them in English. <!–Check out Tom’s Book List for ideas.–>
- Simplified books (e.g. the Penguin Readers series). These are popular books, re-written in simple language for English learners. They are just perfect for beginners and if I were to learn a new language, I would definitely use one of those. They are available in different levels of difficulty — the simplest ones use only 200 basic English words. Try the intermediate or advanced levels (over 1,000 words) — the lowest levels use so few words that they sound quite unnatural.
- Science books. If you are interested in science, you can get great science books written in English. There are many famous English-speaking authors in many subjects, such as psychology, evolutionary biology, physics, or economics.
- Textbooks. If you’re studying at a college and you use textbooks written by English-speaking authors, you can get the original English versions. If you are learning a new computer language, you can use a book in English. You will learn your subject and English at the same time.
- Forums and blogs. Forums, discussion groups and blogs are a unique source of written informal language. Unlike other written sources, such as books or newspapers, they are very close to the way native speakers talk. As such, they are an excellent source of input for English learners. Ideally, stick to forums for native speakers and remember that many native speakers make spelling mistakes.
- E-mail. Like forums and blogs, e-mails from native speakers are a fantastic source of “everyday English”, which is normally the kind of English you want to speak most of the time (except for some formal occasions). Communicating with a native speaker over e-mail gives you a lot of pleasure, as well as an opportunity to practice your writing skills.
- Software. You can start using English versions of your operating system, your word processor, and other applications.
from Antimoon.com
There are three levels of English pronunciation:
- Level 1: People often don’t understand what you want to say. You use the wrong sounds in English words. (example)
- Level 2: People understand what you want to say, but it is unpleasant to listen to you. (example)
- Level 3: People understand you, and your English is pleasant to listen to. (example one, example two)
Level 3 will be called good pronunciation. Notice that good pronunciation is not “perfect American or British accent”. You don’t have to sound like the Queen of England or the President of the United States of America.
Why not? Because there are many regional kinds of English. In England, people from Newcastle speak English differently from people in London. In America, people from New York City, California, and Texas each have their own pronunciation. So it is no problem if you have your own accent.
But your accent must be close to the standards (American and British English). What does it mean? Turn on your TV and watch channels like CNN International, NBC, EuroNews, BBC, or Sky News. You will hear many different people (news anchors, reporters, etc.) from Germany, France, and other non-English-speaking countries. They all have good accents — easy to understand and pleasant.
The rule is: If you are close to the standard, you can always communicate, and your English will be pleasant. If you are far from the standard, sometimes you won’t communicate successfully.
from antimoon.com
1. Developing a passion for learning English
All English learners would like to speak English well. They are excited at the idea of being able to communicate in English fluently. However, they usually don’t care about the learning process itself. For most learners, learning English is a duty — something that they have to, but don’t want to do. They don’t see pleasure in learning English.
In short, most learners would like to speak English well but don’t like to be learning English. This is the first and biggest problem facing an English learner, because a person who doesn’t like to learn English will not learn it well. If you don’t love English, English won’t love you back!
If you want to become a successful learner, you need to like the learning process itself. You need to treat time spent on English as time for pleasure and relaxation. For example, you need to enjoy:
- reading English sentences and thinking about their structure
- learning new words from a dictionary
- writing a correct English sentence by consulting dictionaries, grammar guides, and the Web
- practicing the pronunciation of English sounds and words
Ideally, learning English should be your hobby. You should think of yourself as an English Learner — a person who has chosen learning English as one of their favorite activities.
2. Making the first change to one’s life
The decision to learn English requires changes in your life. For example, deciding that one will read a book in English for 30 minutes every day and keeping to that decision. It’s very difficult to make a small, but permanent change to your life, especially if learning English doesn’t seem “fun”. However, learners should remember that studying English for 15 minutes every day gives you much better results than studying for a whole day once a month.
3. Making further changes to one’s life
While the first change is the most difficult, each subsequent one is hard, too. A lot of learners take the first step (e.g. they start reading a book in English every day) and stop there. They do not engage in other English-building activities.
A good learner will have a set of activities (reading, watching TV, practicing pronunciation, listening to recordings, etc.) and choose from that set according to his or her mood. One activity is not good enough, because (1) you get bored more quickly, and (2) it gives you a range of language skills that is typically too narrow. For example, reading in English can’t improve your pronunciation, although it can improve your grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing skills.)
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