Watch More Movies – and improve your spoken English

There are many things in the English language that have more than one word to describe it and movies are one of them. The word movie is something that has come from the USA and is certainly a term that is not traditionally used in the UK. British people tend to use the word film instead. However, ironically due to American movies being watched more and more across the world the word film is now less common and movies are used a lot. Both words are fine to use in the UK but the movie is probably better in other English speaking countries.

Quite simply a movie in English is 1.5-2 hours of solid English speaking and if you are trying to learn English this is a great way to hear new words, understand new ways of saying things and also improve your spoken English because you get to hear how people say words you may have learned in a lesson. While full online English courses are the best way to learn English watching movies will help further improve and broaden your knowledge. It is like being in a room with people speaking English without having to find a group of people to be in a room with.

One of the hard things but also very useful things about watching movies is the different ways people speak. While the teacher in your online video lessons may be easy to understand, in the real world people speak with a huge range of accents. By watching a range of movies you can pick up and understand some of these accents and this will help you understand people in the real world. However, it is worth being careful to choose movies with mainstream accents and initially avoid rural accents in places you are not likely to visit. For example, if you are planning on working in Australia then watching a movie about rural Scotland may not be very useful and may be very hard to understand.

Depending on how advanced you are in English you can watch a movie in different ways. If you are a beginner then use English subtitles while listening to your native language. This will help you associate words. If you are more advanced then try watching in English and using native subtitles. If you are even more advanced then aim to watch the whole movie in English. If you have to pause the film to think about some words or rewind to hear again then do but the best way to get better is to try to watch it all in English.

If you can you should watch at least one movie a month but once a week would be better. Try getting a group of people together so you can talk about what is happening and learn from each other. Quite often one person will hear something another person may have missed so it is useful to share the learning. If you cannot do this then find some people on our Facebook page who may wish to watch the same movie and then talk about it afterwards on WhatsApp or messenger.

Movies can be a really fun way to help improve your understanding of spoken English and improve your own ability to speak English. TV shows are also useful and seasons on platforms like Netflix can be good if not better than movies because there are hours of watching time with the same accents and people to listen too.