Why Study Spanish Films on Netflix is better than Simple Textbooks

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Written By jolii

Watching movies and TV shows on Netflix can be an excellent and engaging way to enhance your language learning experience.

I know you want to roll your eyes again when browsing the internet and reading another article about watching movies to learn a language but briefly, before your glare is fully focused, hold on and listen to this: learning spanish movies are a game-changer. It does not simply mean choosing a glorified action movie and hoping that a few Spanish words soak in as you pour snacks in your mouth. Subtitles cannot display everything on what you are seeing on your screen.

learning spanish movies

Instead of doing drills on grammar, you get discarded to a street in Spain, listening to real people speak, accents, slang, and watching their facial expressions talking even before they open their mouths. You have the drama, the humour, the heartaches, the pleasure, all swaddled in vocabulary, idioms and gestures which you simply cannot dig out of a workbook.

Subtitles: Nice and Not Temporary

This is where everybody begins. The subtitles are the training wheels you used when you got your first bike. They hold onto your listing. They tell, “Don’t panicking, this is what you have missed.” However, when you are focused on each line with your eyes, your ears will not catch that rapid-fire joke or some significant sigh. Challenge yourself. Begin with Spanish subtitles with Spanish sound. !!Hear the music, the sobs, the shirring of the tongue.

Following round one, it is safe to creep the subtitles out. Watch a favorite scene you know in Spanish with Spanish subs. Hit replay, get rid of the subs and see what you get. One minute, you know how much your individuals can pluck out formally with the written crutch. It is strangely freeing.

Dialogue Does Not Simply Mean Words, It Can Be Music

Movie lingo in most cases does not make it classroom-clear. You encounter accents, mumbling, people being interrupted halfway through the sentence, laughter disrupting words. That’s life. Listen deeply. Read the rhythm. Converse with shadowing. You wind back a line and talk along,–loud and strange as you can.

It is ridiculous, but then, one day you hear that same expression come out of someone on a bus and you heard it in real life, and you just, all of a sudden, understand. That is the gold.

The Living Color Culture

Tapas can be read in the dictionary as much as you like. And even then until you have seen your friends in a movie squeditching around and using their hands when they speak, debating about soccer or a love affair, then you have never lived au courant Spanish. Body language, quickness, irony, they complete the sense. The case is different with humor. This is unlike small talk. You watch with how locals greet, complain or tease. And then, all at once, there it is, that phrase you learned in upper grammar either slips on like a glove or, doubtless, is not used by anybody at all, and now you know all right.

Slang: The Magic Ingredient

learning spanish movies

Netflix dumps electronic textbooks of slang on you. !Que seducida! at a sensation story. In came Vale as an off-hand ok. Throw in the innuendo one-liners and jokes only the very close will know and you won, t find. Begin to make notes about them. The crazier, the much better. They will make you more friends more quickly than super-smooth conjugation of the past tenses.

Playback It With Playback

It is that moment that everybody gets though: a character talks and you cannot make out a thing. Take advantage of the play-back speed. Bring it down to 0.75x. Suddenly the conversation is not a steam locomotive in full flight. You hear words, lines, even insinuated humor. When you start feeling good, turn up the train. By little and little Spanish is beginning to sound less like fast-forward babble and more like conversation.

Stop and Macaw

Take one scene that is both small and dramatic. Watch, pause, say aloud—with emphasis–one line you like. Don t paper it but live it. Complain, chuckle, yell. There is nothing wrong with this becoming a comedy sketch of your living room. Such muscle memory locks up sound and pitch much better than any drill will ever do.

Extensions and Cheat Codes

No Netflix learning goes higher than browser tools. Subtitles that tell you the other half of the dialogue, instant word lookup, looping scenes–now your movie is a language training center. Make a word list. Auto-pause problem areas. No more frantic on the other video rewinding back 10 seconds again and again (unless you enjoyed that joke a reply time).

Make Learning on Movie Night Work Overtime

Habit Formation, not Burnout

Rename your studying into the movie night. Choose one movie every week. In case you are feeling tired, look back at a favorite scene. In due time, you will find that certain words which are the building blocks of anything and everything Spanish keep recurring, episode after episode.

Bring someone along, even when it was all about the snacks to them. Make it a game it is possible to summarize the most crazy scene using only the phrases which he/she has heard during the movie. Who is able to repeat a funny story without glancing at subtitles? It is a riot and works.

Cross Genres Genre Combo-Plate

You want some more spice? Alternate genres. Comedy makes wit and slang sharp. Family dramas introduce heart and simple talk. Thrillers bring tension, and in certain cases, remarkably simple dialog in nerve-racking moments. Kids’ movies? Full of soft phonetic pronunciation, assonance, common words.

Each taste will open a new lesson to you.

learning spanish movies

Every Aha! Celebrate it!

The moment that you read a line as the subtitle drops? Gold moment. Rew it, enjoy it, perhaps boast. And it is no more a movie but a conversation partner, an educator, a window.

Watching Spanish movies on Netflix takes you out of the sidelines and puts you in the real Spanish. On top of the subtitles, listen to the language in the wild, and allow jokes and plots to energize each lesson. Hit play, and have Spanish drip right off the screen into your daily world. Language learning? A sort of language living.