Learning Foreign Languages Through TV and Movies

When Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Monster , many of the articles written about her then included information about the fact that she was from South Africa. Further, when she first came to the United States, she had an accent when speaking English. She, like many other immigrants, learned to speak English and sound like people who had grown up in the United States by watching movies and listening to how actors pronounced words and phrases.

Today when so many students and tourists from the United States go abroad, they can do the same thing in reverse. Once upon a time, Europe was the main destination of students going abroad to study or people who were taking a vacation outside U.S. borders. Many had taken a course or two on either French or Spanish or German while in high school or college, but wasn’t truly fluent in the language. Today travelers are going further afield. From Japan to Chile, Malaysia to Cameroon, ever more exotic locales are attracting large numbers of tourists and study abroad students.

Now, thanks to the widespread syndication abroad of TV programming from the United States, as well as all the first run movies from Hollywood shown in theaters abroad, people from the United States can improve their knowledge and understanding of a foreign language by watching TV programming or movies in the country they’re visiting.

Take Italy, for example. Many popular shows are now shown on TV in Italy. What’s more, they’re shown with all the dialogue dubbed in. Thus, it’s possible to tune in to a program such as Murder, She Wrote , and hear Angela Lansbury (seemingly) speaking fluent Italian. Of course, she’s not. An Italian has dubbed her dialogue in Italian. By watching the show, especially if it’s an episode a visitor has already seen at home, she or he can easily pick up more Italian words and phrases. With enough practice, such newly-acquired additions to the person’s vocabulary can quickly become incorporated into her/his conversaions in Italian.

Using this technique offers other benefits, besides simply learning more words and phrases. It helps with becoming familiar with Italian culture, values, and beliefs. Look, for example, at the Italian translation of the show’s title, Murder , She Wrote . In Italy, it’s entitled La Signora in Giallo . There are several aspects of that translation to note. First of all, the word giallo means yellow in English. But, the show’s title is not The Lady in Yellow .

Rather, the term giallo refers to the actual color of the covers of many murder mystery books on sale in Italy. They are actually a bright yellow, making them easily recognizable to browsers and buyers. The term gialli (the plural of giallo ) therefore carries the meaning of mysteries for Italians.

Under those circumstances, the Italian translation of the TV show’s title makes more sense. The Mysery Lady directly ties in to the character played by Lansbury in the show, a woman who finds herself in each episode solving a murder mystery.

With the arrival of such shows as ER, The Practice , and CSI , more precise and technical language has become a routine part of the dialogue said by characters on a show. As a result, as the shows go into syndication in markets all around the world, visitors can rely upon them to help them widen their understanding of the language spoken in a particular country.

The same is true with movies from Hollywood. Generally, U.S. movies are very popular abroad and earn millions of dollars. Students spending a semester or a year abroad can include moviegoing in their entertainment budget. As they watch the action on the big screen, they can take advantage of the opportunity to increase their understanding of the language spoken.

Even though English is becoming increasingly identified as a universal language, it never hurts to have a working comand of other languages.