how much foreign TV/Cinema to learn language?
 

I know many a mom or auntie that told me they learned English watching our TV. to a certain degree, I picked up a few pointers off Sesame Street as a young 1st gen American kid.

is this even possible? I do think I learned basic phrases of Korean off of my wife's Korean dramas. I can say hello, thanks, yes, no...
I'm picking up some Japanese. I at least know how to act at a restaurant, and what to say or not say.

I wish of all wishes I was multi lingual. like fluent in 6 languages. that would be so sick!!!

I dont think TV will get it done and my aunties are full of it. hahaha.. no way they learned English watching Gun Smoke...

I've wondered the same. I've "heard" usually on movies or shows about folks learning English from watching entertainment. I assume you could learn that way, but I assume that unless you're either gifted at learning languages or have a little bit of existing knowledge of the language that you'd need to supplement with vocab books and use closed captioning (in the language that you're trying to learn).

I think it would be a great supplement if you're learning a language and don't have the opportunity for total immersion. If you aren't taking Spanish classes while living in Spain, then taking Spanish classes while watching as much Spanish TV/movies as possible should speed you along some (probably have to be careful of things like Mexican vs Spanish, etc...).

I'm super curious to see how this thread goes. I'd love to learn Spanish and Japanese (to start). The only thing holding me back is me and my drive to do that vs sit on my butt and surf PP or the Internet or lounge in front of the boob-tube. I'm such a slacker! I need drive like Flatbutt has!

That's how Antonio Banderas learned whatever language the vikings were talking in "The 13th Warrior". He listened!

What about using the cellphone for language translation?......I wonder if that helps learn.

AirPods….

Id say it would get you somewhere with subtitles. And westerns would probably work best because there isnt a ton of talking and they talk slow so the voices line up with the subs.

Allegedly, Jerzy Kosinski (Being There, The Painted Bird) learned to speak English by watching American TV, especially the commercials because the voice-overs were almost always synced with images of the product.

Festus, Ernest T. Bass, Briscoe Darling, etc. ...

Wordsmither extrordinaires :D?

I was thinking about this the other day as I get closer to retirement and will likely spend at least a month or two a year in Thailand. I was think about watching videos and learning at least a word a day or week. But then I looked up how many words we know by age and realized in a few years I'd only be up to 3 year old vocabulary :(

Age Average Vocabulary Size
3 ~3,000 words
5 ~6,000 words
10 ~12,000 words
15 ~20,000 words
20 ~23,000 words

I suspect that you might be at a word a day at first (or maybe even 3-5/week), but as you learn more, I believe the rate of learning would increase. You have to remember when we're learning new words when we're young, we don't have exposure to the words, and we're having to learn and understand the meaning and something that's essentially foreign to us. But learning new stuff now, you've got the existing English version/translation of the word in your head, so for most words it will just be learning the pronunciation and correct usage and pairing that to your existing knowledge.

I didn't learn anything while watching Chinese martial arts movies in Singapore while growing up.

Other than they made really awful martial arts movies. But, it was all we had.

They say you can still learn languages at an advanced age. I sometimes look at Japanese or French and think, nope.

With Japanese, even if you could learn to ask where the restroom was, reading Japanese would be too huge an ask. I know people that grew up in Japan and can speak it enough to get around that can't read or write anything of any real use.

I'm looking at phone apps that translate written and spoken language.

i'm learning key phrases in Japanese. not to bad.


i have a knack for forming sounds with my mouth. mandarin is a B..but my wife says my pronunciation is on point. japanese is cake by comparison.

next year is Korea. i can say hi and thanks. i sometimes mix up which is which when i am under pressure.

Given that the same concept can be expressed in five or six different ways in Japanese, depending on how much respect you wish to give the intended recipient, which version are you learning?

That’s my first hurdle. I might get a few words out, but probably insult the other guy, unwittingly.



And I have seen sentences in French where every word, including all of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were all the same word. No thanks.

Being able to speak a language even if it's at a grade school level would have to be hugely useful if you were traveling in a country even without being able to read/write. Reading and writing another language that does not use the roman alphabet would be a pretty big ask, I would think (at any age). Especially in places like Japan, China, and Korea. I know that Japan has 3 different "alphabets", 2 that are what we would think of as an alphabet (character = a sound) and then kanji which is more like (and based on) the Chinese characters. I don't know if Chinese has anything analogous to katakana/hiragana or if they only have the characters that stand for words/ideas. And I'm not sure about Korean at all other than that I can say "that's Korean" when I see it.

i think everyone in my generation has the informal version down pat thanks to the rockband Styx.

i have the formal version nailed.

and i just cemented "thank you for the meal" burned into my feeble brain.

It would be and the locals all are appreciative of even modest efforts.

That said, pretty much everybody in Japan studies English at some point so they are already miles ahead of me. Pretty common in the EU, as well. I've always gotten by, one way or another. Sometimes I learn a few key phrases, like asking for ice in my glass of Coke in Germany. Huge. Can't drink a room temp Coke.

I intend to spend some time in Japan in the coming years. I may take along a buddy who speaks it or just hire a local to drive me around and interpret, when needed. Best case, I hire an attractive female wasian, although my fallback is a motorcycle racing mechanic that spent a decade or two in So Cal and hasn't got enough going on right now to fill his days. Some friends and I use him for occasional transactions that we do in Japan. If his wife lets him out of the house for a few days, I can probably work a deal.

The wasian would be way better, though.

Thai phrases are easy.

i learned how to say, "not so spicy" fairly quickly. hahah

i spend months learning key phrases every trip. Brazil was tough, since my brain wanted to say everything in spanish.

in Mexico, my fishing guide thought i was damn near mexican with all the cuss words i knew. hahah..

you tell a japanese restaurant owner thank you for the meal, it is really respectful.

i am going to add, "it was a feast" to the end of it.

Japanese is very easy at least as far as pronunciation goes. It uses the most general English pronunciation for consonants and the same vowel pronunciation as Spanish. And in my limited experience, it's relatively simple compared to some other languages (from what I understand German has gender (3) but then I have heard that the gender of the nouns impacts other words in sentences. I don't remember hearing aboun gender in Japanese. Also, Japanese tend to leave out, I think, a lot of pronouns, and rely on the listener to use context to understand who you were talking about (for instance, I don't think they would say "I went to the store", I believe they would just say "went to the store" and you'd need to understand that they meant.

My oldest kid spends a month or two in Thailand and/or Malaysia every year and gets along fine. Sometimes, he has a local to hang with.

I'm holding out for hiring a wasian for the trip. No idea if its likely but we hopin'..

Wasian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cob94xgJvKs

Japanese (and German, and French, etc.) have radically different sentence structures from English. Use something like Google translate and you won't get even half of what they are conveying.

A guy I know in Japan, ruminating on a recent lunch outing:

"Eating lunch early today
I went to "Fujii" in Uchiyama****a.
Today is my first salt Chinese soba and more
I ate it, but the taste started to change.
I popped up my former dude.
I still have to be soy sauce
That's bad"

When I lived in Japan (late 70s and again in the mid 80s) English was a required language for 8 years of their school. Many have feigned not being able to speak/understand English due to lack of use, not wanting to be wrong/appear foolish, and then there's also the matter of the teachers not always having great pronunciation. But often where they may not do well with speech, they may do better with the written word.

Sounds awesome! I've been wanting to go back for years, and the missus would love to as well.

i wish you could meet us there!! you and the wife.

my MN friend that has never traveled outside the USA, sheepishly asked me if his wife and him could join us. they are a bit nervous, and we happily extended the invite.

they told me they have never had sushi before. me; oh, i got this!

i think 1 or 2 days, and we probably wont see them again, as they get their travel legs beneath themselves.

i told them, "dont forget, we are older..old." i aint hitting a japanese nightclub.

We hired Mandarin Tutors for our son starting at age 5. It's not just learning the language, it's the accent too. Research has shown that your accent is set by age 8. My son studied in Hong Kong for a semester and had several friends from Mainland China. They said he spoke Mandarin with no accent.

I picked up a few words sitting in on his lessons but it has now been years so I don't remember a lot. I do like movies in Mandarin and I do pick up a few things as I watch. That said, I will never be able to speak another language fluently. My southern accent makes it hard to pronounce some English words properly (think pin and pen).

I have been playing Ghost of Yotei on the playstation. It's in Japanese with English subtitles, and I have no idea how those verbal words translate to the subtitles. My brain does not get it at all.

I would argue with the bit about accent being set. If that's the case, I think it's a relatively small percentage of the population.
I've met folks that have been speaking a second language for decades and have such a thick accent that they are hard to understand. I've also met folks that have been soaking a second language for <5 years and have almost no accent. I also know a woman that moved to England in her thirties and came back for a visit a few years later with a fairly strong British accent.

I believe that there's an intrinsic trait that some folks have that let them better audibly mimic others while other folks have a very hard time mimicking others. I believe it's also tried to hearing nuance in speech. Folks without the ability have a harder time understanding others that speak with an accent while those with the ability can more easily understand others with accents.

And the ability or lack is, of course, a range not binary.


Just my thoughts. So maybe you and the kids can still learn other languages without an accent issue.

I was once quite fluent in Spanish, and under no illusions that I didn’t have an accent that was obvious to any native speaker.

There are sounds in one language that are made differently than sounds in another. Millions of muscle memory repetitions are quite difficult to break. Some people are good mimics, others not so much.

When I lived in Australia as a kid, I started to pick up a bit of an Australian accent but it didn’t get very far.

When I listen to a native French speaker pronounce words, I’m quite confident that I could never achieve that level of mastery.

personally I have a different attitude towards accents. I am almost jealous of them.

it 100% means to me that the person speaking with an accent is multilingual. I work with a person from Ghana. speaks French and Mandarin. he reads and writes mandarin as well. my wife says he has a stiff accent but is understandable and a total BADASS.

I'm pretty sure when I am ordering food in my first language, I have a terrific accent. the person I am speaking to has never admonished me..ever. they have corrected or helped me clean it up, but never gave me S about it. that is a domestic thing. hahaha..