My Thoughts on Learning English Through Movies

Finally, it’s the weekend again. This morning, I first woke up at 7 a.m., but seeing as it was still a bit early, I went back to sleep. At long last, I woke up for good at 10 a.m. After a long sleep, I feel like my batteries have been fully recharged, and I’m ready to take on new challenges of the day.

As today is Day 1 of the Chinese New Year holidays, most of the major shops and restaurants are closed here in Singapore. As such, I can forget about shopping or dining out, but luckily, movie theaters are open, so I might catch a film later today depending on my mood.

To be honest, I don’t go to the cinema very often, not because I don’t like movies, but because there is a plethora of choices available nowadays with streaming services such as Netflix and the Apple Movie Store. They have rendered a trip to the theater unnecessary, unless there is a freshly released movie playing that I desperately want to watch.

When I first came to Singapore 22 years ago, I used to visit the cinema almost on a weekly basis, as it was the biggest source of entertainment for me. Back then, there was a movie theater right in my neighborhood, which offered midnight showings on Fridays and Saturdays. I would catch the latest Hollywood blockbuster movie and try to study its dialogues in English.

I remember seeing films like “Two Weeks Notice,” “Love Actually,” and “Match Point,” which I found very charming and entertaining. As a gay man, I was so profoundly moved by “Brokeback Mountain” that I watched it more than a dozen times at the theater. “Argo” was another movie that deeply affected me and kept me thinking about it for days after the first viewing. I somewhat miss those days when I went to the theater frequently.

By the way, in terms of learning English, I am rather skeptical of the efficacy of watching movies in elevating your spoken fluency, especially if it’s the only method you practice, without pairing it with other learning methods, such as learning vocabulary and reading books.

It is true that some learners manage to learn English to a highly advanced level by watching movies and television shows, but we shouldn’t forget that they achieve fluency not only by watching movies, but also by hitting pause on the video whenever they stumble upon unknown words and phrases and looking them up in the dictionary before resuming the video. This takes nearly superhuman effort and patience which, in my opinion, makes the method inefficient at best. It’s definitely not a walk in the park to learn English through movies alone. 

As I’m learning French now, I’ll keep reminding myself that I shouldn’t rely too much on watching movies to improve my French proficiency, but should rather focus on traditional methods, such as conscientiously learning words and phrases, especially when I’m still at an intermediate level. That being said, it would be wonderful if I could understand and enjoy French cinema. I will keep working hard until I achieve fluency in the language of Rousseau.