Learning spanish with movies

 

A very similar method is to get Spanish-language movies, turn on the Spanish subtitles (NOT the English ones!), and then watch it, pausing whenever I hear something I don’t understand–then, I just look at the bottom of the screen where I can see whatever word or phrase it was that threw me, look it up, learn it, and note it for later review…then just press play and wash, rinse, repeat until I’m through with the movie (which may very well take a few weeks)!

Oh, and always remember to pause and repeat after the speaker if your Spanish isn’t already excellent or you see a new word.  Rewind, replay, and repeat until you’ve got it down cold.

An even better way to do this can be done if you can obtain the English translation of the script–this is not very often, but it does happen.  What you do is watch the movie with the Spanish subtitles on and the English translation of the script so that you can follow along and, of course, pause at anything you don’t know and immediately learn it, just like above (the script just makes it a lot easier and allows you to learn things you wouldn’t be able to otherwise).  

My all-time favorite movie where I managed to pull this off is Maria Full of Grace (María llena eres de gracia), which is an absolutely wonderful movie, especially if you’re interested in Colombia and/or want to learn to speak with a Colombian accent (considered to be the cleanest, easiest to understand, and most neutral Spanish accent in the world).  

You can get the English translation of the script for it here on Scribd (download, print, whatever you want), and what’s so awesome about this is that now instead of looking up individual words and phrases as you go along, you’ve got an actual translation so you can understand the meaning of what’s being said in-context, which is faaaar more valuable than having a dictionary definition of a single word.  This will make it much easier to understand what’s being said, what expressions and idioms mean, what certain words mean when they’re used in certain contexts, what a certain intonation or bit of body language means when coupled with a certain phrase, etc., etc., etc. See how awesome this is?

Of course, this presumes you can get the English translation of the script, which you often can’t, but you can often enough that it’s always worth the trouble to find out if a Spanish language movie has one available on the internet–easiest way to find out is to just Google “[movie title] english script” and “[movie title] script” and see what comes up.  If that doesn’t immediately turn it up, three great sites to check with are The Internet Movie Script Database, Drew’s Script-O-Rama (go to the menu at the bottom under the picture–yes, I know, his site design does suck), and Simply Scripts.  Not only can you find movie scripts, but you can often find scripts for TV shows as well.

Un paréntesis…

You may want to check out our List of Best Free Sites to Watch Spanish-Language TV Online where we put together THE most comprehensive list of such sites you’ll find – I checked every other available list on the internet in the process of putting this together and, as such, mine not only includes more sites but ALL of them are guaranteed to work because I personally hand-checked each and every one to make sure you could use them and that it didn’t cost anything.  Every other list I checked had dead links in it (links to sites that no longer worked).

Alright, well I think that’s it, if you’ve got any additional tips or resources (or questions), please please please post them in the comments, they’re more than welcome!!