Learn & Improve Your English By Watching Movies

Besides listening to the Smartfm’s English for Your Business programs, there are many ways of improving your English skills, Smart Listener. One of the best and most fun ways is through English-speaking movies or films. You can improve your English a lot when you watch such movies, and it will be best if you watch the movies on DVDs.

You will notice that the English-speaking movies are much better in the original. Watching a dubbed film will never be as good as watching the original/English version. Why? It is because in the original version, the actors’ voices are real. Everything is just like the movie 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. 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!  

• 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. Therefore, the actors talk fast, just like native speakers talk in real life.

You always have to make sure that you can understand and learn the movie every time you watch it. You won’t learn anything from the movie if you don’t understand it. You probably won’t enjoy it, either.