Depending on your target language, there is probably visual media that you can use to help you learn it. Nowadays it’s more common to find online video than to watch on DVD or VCR, and with the spread of streaming and sites like YouTube, there are videos available for many world languages. This article will be about the uses of these resources in learning, and also how to find and access them.
Finding Online Video
Some of the best resources, you may already be familiar with. YouTube, for instance, is used by people worldwide and carries video in a huge number of languages. You won’t go wrong if you do a keyword search for a topic you’re interested in and the language you’re learning on YouTube, for example “Sports Hindi”.
Depending on the country and language, there may be online streaming services specializing in media from your target language. Just search ‘movies in (your target language)’ in a search engine and see what you find. If you know a native speaker, you can also consult with them about where to find video media for you to use.
Learning with Video
Now let’s discuss how to actually learn with these materials. While you can just watch (with subtitles if available) and try to absorb, unless you already can understand almost an entire video or film, it’s better to approach it as something to be studied and practiced. Visual media will be especially helpful for learning about cultural references and ideas associated with the target languages, body language, colloquial speech, and listening comprehension.
1. Tracking what you Learn
A useful thing about visual media is that you can stop and go back to watch what you’ve already seen to work on comprehension. Whenever you watch something and encounter new phrases or ways of saying things, or even things like body language, you should make sure to record it. That way you can enter it into your memory system and make use of it yourself later.
2. Learning about Culture
As mentioned above, visual media is an excellent way to learn about how many facets of the culture connect to your target language. Just learning the grammar and pronunciation of a language with vocabulary will never be enough to communicate correctly on its own, rather you need to combine it with cultural input, for which visual media is an excellent resource.
Body language is one of these facets. It can be hard to pick up on how you should be moving when you speak face-to-face with native speakers, when you’re focused on a lot of other things going on. Through movies and videos, you can see how people with different identities and roles use their bodies to express while they speak. Studying and imitating this can be a way to help yourself seem more native and communicate better.
Another facet is sayings and metaphors. In movies and shows, people will speak in a way that sounds culturally appropriate to speakers of the language at the time they were produced, so you will hear expressions and sayings that you may commonly encounter with native speakers. You should learn these and use them yourself. Just be careful not to watch movies from more than a few decades ago and trying to imitate that way of speaking. You might end up sound like someone from a different era!
You can also find out about social structure and relations between different groups of people. Movies present an archetypal version of society, where often a single character will stand in for a cultural idea about a certain group of people. Pay close attention to differences of wealth, sex, gender, and place of origin. How do people address each other, what sort of body language do they use with one another? You can record your observations in your Memory System.Learning about these will help you navigate your own place in the culture and better communicate and understand with native speakers.
3. Developing Conversational Material
Another use of visual media, especially more current or classic movies and shows, is to have something to talk about with native speakers. Many languages are associated with strong theater-going cultures, often with attached film industries such as Bollywood (for Hindi movies), Nollywood (for Nigeria), and so on. Just like shows and movies in the languages you already know, people in different cultures discuss their own visual media all the time.
Let’s think about how to implement this in conversation. If you’ve followed the points above, you’ve watched and studied some shows and movies in some depth. If you’re trying to get to know someone, you can ask in your target languages simply, “what shows and movies do you like to watch?” You can listen to what they say, and comment on the ones that you’ve seen too. You can ask them about their favorite movie, or what actors they like or prefer. It’s a great way to find something in common with someone from a different culture. People might also appreciate that you already know so much about popular culture and can talk about it with them.
Conclusion
We’ve gone over how to find visual media and how to use it to learn in your target language. We’ve gone over the uses for it, and why it’s important. After reading this article, you should know how to:
- Look for visual media online
- Learn from it, making use of your memory system
- Deploy the knowledge you learned from it
