Learn English By Watching Movies

Watching movies is a great way to learn English! Most of the best students I meet watch a lot of movies. It’s excellent for listening, speaking, vocabulary, slang and idioms, even for reading.

Here are two different ways to use movies to learn English:

1. For speaking and listening fluency, just watch the movie for fun without stopping. Find a movie you like and watch it many times. Don’t worry about understanding every word. The first time you might watch with subtitles in your language so that you know the story, but after that only use English subtitles or no subtitles, and listen in English. This will improve both your speaking and your listening. (Yes, it’s true: you learn to speak by listening and you learn to write by reading.)

2. For reading, writing and vocabulary, choose a few minutes of the movie and go through it very slowly. Look at each sentence carefully and look up all the words in your dictionary. Repeat the sentences out loud.

If you’re only going to use one of these methods, do the first one. Don’t do #2 too much or you might get lost in your dictionary and thinking too much.

Watching movies on DVD is much better than watching on cable TV. Using DVDs you can repeat the movie when you want to, as many times as you want; you can control the subtitles, and you can choose the movies that you like.

Join my online English classes and we will talk through some movie clips together. It’s a great way to use movies to improve your English fluency.

Movie Clips

• Brad Pitt And Bruce Willis In A Mental Hospital - 12 Monkeys

  Here's a clip from one of my all-time favorite movies: 12 Monkeys. I've seen this movie at least 7 or 8 times! This movie is a masterpiece by director Terry Gilliam and it is an example of a filmmaker using a movie to deliver their personal message ...

• Your Mission Jim - Ghost Protocol

  This is the "your mission" scene from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. I know that the Tom Cruise character is named Ethan, not Jim, but I watched the old Mission Impossible TV series when I was a kid in the '60's and '70's and in my mind I alway...

• Who Killed My Sister from The Wizard of Oz

  I love this movie! When I was a child The Wizard of Oz was on television every year. I remember when my family got our first color TV in the 1960's because the first time we watched this movie in color we were amazed when Dorothy opens the door to Oz a...