Movies Are Good Way Learn a Language

Watching a Film in Original Language is Very Useful

I graduated from the University of Florence in Foreign Languages, and as a student, to improve my English or German, I eagerly used to watch movies in those languages. It was frustrating and sometimes stressful but effective in the end.

In the beginning, it was hard for me to understand the word meanings, especially when I was in my first year. However, I was stubborn in those days because I believed (I still do) that I would undergo a positive process of understanding the language. I would get familiar with the pronunciation, rhythm, and vocabulary of the language I was listening to.

Eventually, I realized that even if I could not completely understand expressions, phrases, and so forth, I would be in total language immersion, and out of the hundreds of expressions and words in a movie, something would remain in my brain.

A Good Experience For Students Who Learn Italian

Now that I’m a teacher, an Italian language tutor, I suggest watching movies in the original language. It is a frustrating experience initially, and maybe it will continue to be like that for our Italian language students for some time. Still, I’m quite confident that they will achieve great learning results in the mid-term.

Selecting The Right Movies

Even though watching a foreign movie is a rewarding experience, selecting the right one is extremely important; otherwise, one risks to be bored and turned away from a language.

At Parola school, for instance, we have Italian language films that are full of dialectal words and expressions. And this is frustrating, and it is a huge deterrent for loving and learning a language, and Italian is full of dialects, from Neapolitan to Venetian.

But Parola also provides students with many movies in which there is a standard Italian: these are the ones we show the most because they are the right way to introduce our students to the Italian language.

In conclusion, watching a movie is an effective, stimulating, and rewarding way to learn a language. Still, especially in Italian, it is important to choose from nice films with standard Italian not to get linguistically frustrated.