How To Understand TV Series and Movies Without Subtitles

[Music] in this week's podcast we're talking all about how to understand tv series and movies without subtitles ethan justin and i discussed three key things that are going to help you which are vocabulary connected speech and cultural context so to learn more continue listening or watching and as always head on over to our instagram at reallife.english for some bonus tips as soon as you finish listening to this podcast ah yeah boys and girls citizens of the world this is ethan from reallife english where we believe that listening to podcasts is a fun natural convenient and gorgeous way to learn english so download this podcast and listen to it while you're shopping at the mall trying on some new shoes or even having a lovely long soak in the bath i'm joined here in the global studio first of all by the man who can speak braille justin murray oh yeah what is up and as always by the lovely andrea how's it going andrea i'm great thank you how are you ethan doing fantastic and if you're watching this now on youtube i highly recommend that you also download the podcast which is linked down in the description and you can listen to it anytime in your convenient moments just like we said if you're in the bath relaxing if you're walking your dog if you're bored in line at the supermarket well we'll make that boring moment super fun for you so be sure to kind of take your learning to the next level in those convenient moments that said justin what does it mean if you can speak braille well braille is actually the language for blind people right they can feel it with their fingers right so you can't speak it technically you feel it you're the only person who's been able to learn it fluently so speaking about understanding and learning languages today we are going to be talking about a problem that we hear all the time of frustration that we hear all the time especially because we're kind of experts in learning english with tv series and movies and other fun media and we've kind of just met so many learners around the world who they've studied they've learned the grammar they've kind of done everything that their teachers have told them to that different youtubers have told them to that they've been like reading different articles about maybe they've even had like the opportunity to live in an english-speaking country but like even after all that time invested all that struggle all of that sacrifice that you still kind of will have that frustration that you can't even relax and watch your favorite tv series without subtitles yeah that is a big one and that's the whole reason why we started learning which tv series and fluently friends but rest assured you can get past it you can embrace where you're at you can make it an active learning process to succeed and we're here with you can enjoy the journey not just the destination before we get too much ahead of ourselves let's take a look at a shout out to a very special real lifer out there [Music] okay so today's shout out comes from mustafa from dubai and he says hello from the hottest city in the world of course in terms of weather i'm not an english learner since i'm living english for more than 15 years but i've started to learn from you guys you are awesome and i'm both learning and enjoying good luck and ah yeah that's so awesome and i really loved what he said about uh living his english he's not learning english anymore he's living it and i think that that's such an important kind of like shift in your mentality that you can have that you're no longer looking at it as like a dry boring school subject but it's something that is just part of your life that is real world fluency right think about it oh yeah so if you want to shout you out it's really simple you just have to head over to apple podcast stitcher or wherever you're listening to us just like mustafa did and leave us a five star review and the other really great thing when you do this is you're helping other learners from all around the world to have a lot of fun learning with us that said let's take a look at a really amazing quote that we have [Music] all right so today's quote was actually chosen by ethan but i'm going to read it so it's by epictetus which i believe is a maybe a greek philosopher i don't know i'm just guessing but we have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak andrea since you're the expert on greek how would you how would you say that well in greek it's um epictetus there you go and i guess yeah i think you did a great job though justin you know it's these ones are always quite hard to to pronounce the the lovely greek philosophers so what is so special about that quote justin so what's so special is there are two kind of two layers to this first of all it's about listening having that empathy having that diplomacy to listen more than you speak so you have one mouth and two ears so you should you should listen more than you speak and then from the perspective of today's lesson of understanding english without subtitles it's really important for all english learners to listen more to listen to podcasts to practice their listening to watch tv shows to watch movies to listen to music because the world is is full of native english and so important to listen and non-native english too but definitely this can be a huge push for your fluency think about a baby for example before they actually utter their first word that baby that child is a toddler is listening for years or for a long time before they actually get the hang of their speaking exactly so definitely open your ears to this lesson and i think that that is a perfect jump off point into today's main topic [Music] so if you follow us on our youtube channel learning tv series well if you're watching this on youtube maybe you're already a subscriber over there and if you're not we can also link that down in the description below so you can go check it out because it'll definitely help you if your goal is to understand tv series without subtitles but we always say that we want to help you to understand fast speaking natives and to understand your favorite tv series and movies music and whatever without getting lost without missing the jokes and without subtitles so justin how exactly did we come about this kind of slogan that we use over on that channel well it's directly from surveys that we've done with learners to really understand your listening panes so we sent out surveys from real life english just really trying to understand like what problems you're having when you're listening and people came back with answers basically saying they get lost they miss the jokes and they want to learn english without subtitles so we just kind of made it into this this slogan ultimately when they're when you're watching tv shows it's really frustrating that frustration of getting lost because you miss a word or you you miss the cultural context or the pronunciation and then you hear the laugh track in the background right and i said come the laugh track is like when the artificial laughter when you're supposed to laugh and so ultimately the big ambitious goal is to watch english without subtitles yeah so we'll be talking a lot more about all of those things but that is kind of one of our goals one of our big goals at real life english is to kind of like help you to be able to do all those things so you kind of have that confidence that you can like sit back and relax with the tv series without kind of having those frustrations of being lost of missing the jokes of like needing to depend on the crutch of subtitles yeah that's really interesting what you're saying there about crutches i think i think about it like this because subtitles are crutches what is a crutch what are crutches andrea well crutches literally are the these kind of they kind of look a bit like sticks they're usually made of metal and they help you to walk like if you have a broken leg or something like that so they they help you so that you can be able to move but it doesn't mean that in this respect does it well it could i like to think about i like to think about the the person kind of walking with crutches and they finally get to the point where they throw their crutches off because they don't need them anymore it's kind of like a child like riding their their bicycle or their tricycle with um the training wheels right not tricycle but they're the bicycles with training wheels the training wheels are the wheels that are supposed to help them as they get adapted riding their bike and then taking those training wheels off that's a nice way of looking at it yeah definitely i think that that's maybe better than crutches too because crutches it's kind of like you have some weakness right and you need those crutches because like you're healing or whatever but training wheels are more like empowering because you're using those so that you can get to the point that you can enjoy riding the bike without the training wheels and i think maybe that's a better metaphor for like the subtitles and for other resources kind of like you know we have our different courses like that's pretty much why we created our fluent with friends course and our real-life native immersion course is to kind of be the training wheels that you would need to get the resources to be able to have like a conversation with a native and to feel confident that you can understand what they're going to say or you know to be able to sit back and relax with a tv series or a movie without needing to depend so much on the subtitles yeah for example one of the core features of the fluent friends course and the native immersion course which follows some of our podcasts 40 of our podcasts is basically to take the transcript put footnotes and break down all the native connected speech all of the when we when we cut and connect our words the the advanced vocabulary all the things that you'd struggle with the jokes and the cultural context to really kind of give you that context for you to to learn it understand it and then listen to it again and we also do this on the on the learning english tv series channel so how do we do it on on that channel ethan well that really evolved out of our fluent with friends course of course and it also i think has kind of like evolved since we've been editing those and we've gotten better i think just at producing those videos especially if you go and see some of the old ones i'd be a bit embarrassed about those but you can see that nowadays we've got much higher quality of being able to to do this but basically how we have translated that to the screen the first you'll watch the clip of the tv series or movie with subtitles so that you kind of have those training wheels that you need and then we actually teach you all the most important vocabulary and connected speech as justin was explaining and anything that might be difficult for the typical learner and then finally to kind of put into practice everything that you've learned we test you by showing you the scene of final time without subtitles so it's kind of like you have to really apply all that vocabulary that you've learned all that connected speech and see if you can actually watch it again without getting lost and i think um the reason that we do this is because we've seen the most people by going through that whole process by the time they get to the test watching without the subtitles they've probably taken up their comprehension of that clip by like at least 10 percent probably a lot more yeah it's a big aha moment to take a clip that you don't understand you study it and then you do understand it it's very empowering because they realize that hard work pays off and as you link different scenes together and and build your vocabulary it gets easier and easier so that said you mentioned a few things justin and i think we can explain briefly each one of those and kind of like how those form a part of actually being able to get to the point where you can understand a series or a movie without the subtitles so i think you talked about vocabulary connected speech which is kind of like how we natives cut and connect our words and also within that just like sound morphing because this happens i think just even within words and other aspects of our pronunciation which is a lot different than you might have learned at school and then finally the cultural context so so like the jokes and things like that that you would need to know that so the first one jumping into native vocabulary so it's really important to learn lots of different types of vocabulary because obviously we natives don't make it that easy for people we speak using lots of expressions and idioms which we spoke about last week on the podcast and like even slang is like a completely other language as well so depending on where you're traveling in the uk for example you're going to hear like what seems like a completely different language so i've only mentioned a few so far but these are a really good starting point in understanding and learning more vocabulary i would say vocabulary is super important to start with because even if you have great listening comprehension if you don't have the building blocks which is vocabulary if you don't have the content to really understand the meaning in your mind you can't understand the rest same thing with cultural context it's like vocabulary ultimately is the base because it's going to give you the building blocks for that fluency and i think once you have that really good base uh you can get to the point where you'll understand kind of new things through the context so it's kind of like uh i think the pieces of a puzzle right so that if you have enough pieces once that kind of whole picture starts to come together of the puzzle then all the other pieces just kind of fall in place naturally so when you have that vocabulary then you know even maybe if you missed something because it wasn't pronounced like you might expect it to be pronounced or because you know there was a joke about some person maybe you'll be able to kind of put those things together because you had the the kind of big enough base of vocabulary to get 70 percent of what was said in a certain phrase one of the things mentioned there is you know getting to the point where it's like you're starting to put the the pieces of the puzzle together it's the jigsaw puzzle right you're putting you're taking the pieces putting them together at first you can't really see the picture right but if you get enough pieces you can start seeing you can start seeing it and understanding it and and this is really important to get the general idea once you get the general idea it's great because maybe you don't understand 100 of everything maybe there are a lot of gaps but still you understand the story and that's so much more engaging and interesting and so you gain more motivation you do it more and that starts accelerating your whole process and i think being really kind to yourself too throughout this process because i think when you start watching any new show especially and this is something we can talk a little bit more about maybe some series are harder to understand than others but i think there's always kind of at first you know it's a new sort of story or it's a new situation uh there's characters that you haven't gotten used to hearing them speak yet and once you get kind of like more accustomed to it maybe at the beginning you only understand 50 or 60 but as you kind of get used to watching it even if you're doing that more passively just kind of like naturally over time it's going to start getting easier for you now you can definitely get a lot out of just like passively watching a series but when you actually make that learning active and that's what we try to help you to do on learning to a tv series and with our fluent with friends course then i think it just is like rocket fuel for your ability to learn with that piece of media wouldn't it be great if there was some way to understand real english without getting lost and without getting bored well now there is with our real life native immersion course we will take you on a 41 week real-life adventure of the english language each week exploring a different topic connected to our goal to help you understand and use real native english and make it a permanent part of your life in a way that is fun natural and convenient the best part is you can try it for free with our three part power learning series we will send it to your email just go to reallifeglobal.com pod that's p p-o-d to sign up [Music] so what would be some tips that we can make it more active while we're learning so it's really important to deliberately practice certain aspects of this like because passive learning is is great it's really going to help you and it's very important part of learning but you need to actively work on specific things in order to improve your level so for example i've just been working on a lesson with discourse markers and these are a really important aspect of vocabulary because when you can recognize them you can then actually if you understand that it's a discourse marker which is basically just like a filler and i actually noticed from starting to work on the podcast and recording the podcast just how much i used them so it really allowed me to realize how much i use discourse markers can you give a couple examples yeah so there's one so so it's just kind of linking my ideas together you don't really need to know the meaning of it or really think about oh so she's saying so what does that mean and then there's other ones like i mean we use i mean a lot at the start of sentences as well but it's just to kind of kick off the sentence you don't really need to think about those words so if you're identifying those if you've actually worked on this you can identify them and not spend so much time translating them or thinking about them and then when when you have a really good grip of them you can even start using them yourself and what they're going to do is buy you thinking time in those moments where you're maybe having a conversation and you're not quite sure what to say next you can if it's more natural to you you can use discourse markers as a way to think about what to say next there's a really interesting video of justin bieber he says like like 63 times in a 60-second interview it was amazing we should probably go through the podcast and count how many discourse markers we use i think there's a moderate amount you can use and you sound good you sound nissan really fluent but if you use them too much it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about that's the thing sometimes people overuse them so it's important to be aware of that especially like i think that's a really american thing but definitely something that has influenced the uk as well it's true whether you're native or a learner so i think like another really important thing too that we include with all of our courses is spaced repetition software and so many learners talk about like the frustration about not being able to remember vocabulary like you have maybe a lot of vocabulary that you understand it when you hear it but then when you actually get the chance to speak it's like it's nowhere to be found it's it's gone from your memory and when you use the space repetition software uh and some of the ones that we tend to recommend are like anki or memrise then basically you'll be able to kind of like remember these forever because they work with your brain in the same way that your brain would forget something they kind of like give you these reminders to study certain words and you can do all sorts of different things with this too you can add like audio you can add pictures which also can help you to remember so definitely check out some app like that if you're not using it already then it's definitely a must-have in your arsenal of english learning tools and even like as a step towards that it's just taking notes having a pen and paper having the pen in your hand and a piece of paper as you hear a new word be curious huh i didn't know that word and look it up later you could even stop it and look it up at that moment just taking notes and something that sounds nice to you being a being a connoisseur of vocabulary what's a connoisseur connoisseur what what does that mean andrea do you know is it like when you're an expert you're an expert in in something like a wine connoisseur or something it always makes me think of that you know someone that really knows that topic or that field i'd like to think of it more more and like as well like the person is like interested in it you know what i mean the person has a deep interest in it you're like ah i love that word and even you know making like a vocabulary notebook for example keeping the words that you want to integrate into vocabulary and so the words that maybe you might want to take from your passive vocabulary make them active totally so we've talked a lot about vocabulary i think that another thing that is maybe going to be even trickier for people but when you discover it and you start to kind of learn some of the principles of it it can just be life-changing i think as far as your english learning goes and that's connected speech which a lot of people tend to think that only americans do this is that true andrea it's not true no it's not just you guys we're guilty as well and you guys have different forms of it and stuff and i think that's true of pretty much every accent of english we all use connected speech and that just basically i think is something that comes about because of the way that the english language works compared to other languages and basically if you don't know anything about this then probably you're going to have a lot of moments where you feel stuck you feel lost because most most schools don't teach this and so you know when you actually like hear something you're not expecting it to hear it in that way and you're just gonna feel like a deer in the headlights so in the most basic level connected speech are in words like and wanna right like a lot of people think like connected speech they'll say it's actually colloquial and that's true in some sense it's the way we speak and sometimes like really connecting your words it can be kind of colloquial for example the word the phrase i'm going to i'm gonna it's not so colloquial anymore if you write it that's colloquial in your written language but in your spoken language no it's like that you can use that in a formal situation even the word it's reduced it's even connected more to amina i don't know if you got do you guys do that in in england andrea maybe you're like i'm a i'm a go oh and i actually know that sounded really that sounded really weird saying it no i feel like sometimes i have used it but maybe we haven't taken it that far yet maybe i'm just influenced by a tv series and movies and you guys i i noticed like when i visited home recently my nephew he's using this just in a standard day-to-day conversation so it's like the english language is really evolving and it's like you know i'm a i'm gonna go now so it's like did you just say that really so this comes from i i thought i first recognized this from rap music but you you see this reduction of going from i'm going to to i'm gonna to amina and amma right and there's a lot of that going on so for example you know like we there's some rules like t plus y equals the sun for example what you becomes what's you did you did you um the american d like better you know i can say like the glottals you guys use that a lot in england right andrea what would that be yeah so instead of saying water people might say water or instead of saying better they would say better in american english we say this a lot with like like the nt sound like mountain sometimes mountain fountain and one that andrea recently uh helped me discover from british english which i find really mind-boggling is when you have like they add an r sound so for example how would you say law and order we'd say in the u.s law and order how would you say that we would say law and order yeah this is like you guys say like i don't know do you say idea idea like the idea how do you say that word idea i think it depends what's coming after we might even add in an r an intro intruding r after that as well yeah so as you can see the english language it's much more sophisticated and complex than maybe you learned in school and this is definitely something that if you become a connoisseur of pronunciation you can see that you can you can really see the rhythm and flow of the english language and learn some of the mechanics and if you start imitating natives it's really important to recognize that you don't need to speak like a native you don't need to speak with a perfect native accent but it can be like going to the gym and like lifting weights you get your muscles get stronger and with pronunciation it's the same thing it's like you're you're speaking with your oral musculature and so if you go to the gym of imitation practicing the native pronunciation that can really help you speak better speak more clearly and speak more confidently too if you want a really fun way to practice this we made a really popular video with eminem and we actually have kind of like an exercise in there that we used to do i know justin i at least we used to do with a lot of our students um with the song from the movie eight mile so that can be if you're kind of new to connect to speech and you want to try your hand at using it and kind of like open your mind to how common this really is in english then that can be a really interesting way to get started at it that said andrea what is like the third key that people need if they want to be able to understand even without subtitles so the third key is cultural context and this is again so important because every place has a different kind of context and history and it's really going to help you to understand the language a lot better and just the culture exactly so i think something like that can be really interesting is actually knowing a little bit more about the place so um if you're actually maybe this is important for everyone but you know if you want to go live in the us or you want to go live in the uk it's going to be really important and even if you just want to be able to enjoy the tv series or the movies from that place it's going to be really important so it can be like worth to learn a little bit you don't need to become an expert or connoisseur as justin was saying of the history or of like the politics or anything but like learning a little bit can kind of like help you be on the level of like understanding that cultural context i think sometimes maybe you're like with a group of people for example and they'll be mentioning names like they all know each other and you're new for example they'll be mentioning names places and and you can really be hard on yourself you know get down on yourself to think that you don't understand natives and blah blah blah but if you look at it if you really start to understand kind of what you're missing you realize you're not missing the core language you're just missing some details and the right answer there is is not to be hard on yourself but it's just to be curious and to really seek to understand i think that uh you definitely need to be like like justin said don't be hard on yourself what does that mean to not be hard on yourself just not be hard on yourself means to don't punish yourself you know don't don't go into that negative self-talk and be like oh you know my english is so bad i don't understand you know blah blah blah yeah i think it's definitely important to be kind to yourself i recognize sometimes too when i watch certain series like especially sitcoms comedies that they'll make a certain joke about a certain person or you know an event or something like that and i don't know about it and and i don't find the joke funny even though i'm like hearing that laugh track so this happens to natives too and i think just recognizing that while it's important to have some cultural insight it's normal that you're not going to understand every single joke and you know that's okay i think it's just kind of like striving to realize what's actually important and i think that's a really great thing that we at least try to do through learning english with tv series and fluent with friends is trying to point out to you what is actually important to understand and so that you can get a little bit more of that cultural insight and be able to laugh more with the jokes one other type of cultural context which is more based on your skills with the language and your vocabulary and pronunciation is wordplay because sometimes we you know we make jokes with with you know different meanings of the words and sometimes they're perverted sometimes they're not but ultimately it demands kind of like a ninja understanding of language like a much more advanced understanding really not have to think twice to really know all the meanings of it and to really connect the dots really quickly so that's another aspect of cultural context which just demands practice and sometimes you need to stop and just like really understand why people are laughing you can go back to the example of like if you wear the group of people you know they make a joke and you understand it literally right but they need to explain why it's funny in a deeper sense you know yeah so maybe like what we were saying before there's like some proper noun involved right if it has to do with like history or a certain person or something like that and if that's not present something something along those lines you're not saying like a capitalized noun then it might be something like justin saying where word play usually you need to know like what synonyms does this word have like what other ways can that be used and a lot of times they'll be that kind of like play on words and another thing which is it's common in the us i think it's even more common in the uk which i think is even more difficult maybe than wordplay is like sarcasm and that in american english at least we tend to change our tone a lot so you can kind of like learn that tone and start to understand that but um i think maybe in the uk you have more of an issue with this right yeah definitely because the sense of humor is very dry so people will make fun of themselves they'll make fun of other people but it's not so obvious so like you said maybe in the us when people are being sarcastic their tone changes whereas in the uk they don't change their tone so much so sometimes even a native for example could be like are they being serious or are they joking and it's not very clear so i i think a great example and a great tv series to to watch for this as well is the uk office because um it's just a great example of you know sarcasm this typical dry british sense of humor as well so definitely watch that if you want to learn a little bit more about the british culture and and understanding context and comparing it to the american version too because the american version is exactly like so slapstick humor what does that mean this slapstick you mentioned slapstick humor is kind of like the over-the-top humor like the the kind of like it's so obvious it's like the typical american humor it's almost like the three stooges these three sewages kind of invented it probably but it's a different type of humor than it's very stark contrast you can take the same script physical comedy right yeah yeah because they actually i remember the the first episode of the us office was an exact copy of the uk one but it didn't really work as much and then obviously it evolved and they made it into their own and that's just a great series too definitely so i think kind of that's another really big cultural insight is like being able to know like what are the kinds of jokes that they make so maybe if there's a certain place you're planning on traveling or if you're learning that certain accent more then that definitely can be kind of valuable to maybe study up a little bit on like what is british humor what is american humor so one thing i just want to emphasize here is it's really important to understand that you don't need to understand 100 natives don't understand 100 uh most people don't understand 100 maybe you might be under the illusion that you have you get the general idea that you understand 100 but most of the time it's really hard to understand 100 so it's it's okay to stop listen study grab your notepad really make it an active learning process integrate it with the other study habits that you have like space repetition that we're talking about and really just look at it as a process remember uh remember understanding tv shows without subtitles is a journey not a destination exactly so i think that another part of that too is just when you're watching some tv series maybe you're actually like following and i think kind of the thing to see is like are you making progress so like with each episode or maybe you'll even watch an episode and then you'll study it a little bit kind of you know like uh the same way that we teach on learning with tv series and in our fluent with friends course maybe you're doing this on your own so you like watch it kind of like study some things and then like watch it again or if you're even just kind of more passively learning and you're just going through uh and watching episode by episode do you see that progress do you see that like you're starting to understand better did you start out at 50 and now you feel like you can understand 60 or 70 percent and i think like making sure that as long as you're kind of getting a little bit better all the time it means that you know you're you're advancing your language skills so i think that as you're seeing that kind of like journey you know there's going to be parts that are harder and easier but to keep at it you know to not give up and know that at some point you're not going to get to 100 probably ever but maybe you can get to 95 and you'll get to the point where you can just understand through the context like we were kind of saying uh getting enough pieces of the puzzle that you can kind of see the whole picture i would add there that it's really important to have patience and humility i mean you're talking about patience there but i think the humility to watch a tv show a tv series and not understand everything because i think a lot of times we want to understand everything and so it's sometimes we we we're harder than ourselves because we're not understanding it and maybe you also want to be entertained often times so you have to find a balance find a way to keep that engagement with learning you can go back and kind of verify your understanding you can even watch you know with subtitles in your own language and then compare even so it doesn't mean that if you're learning without subtitles that you can't use subtitles as well you can't use subtitles in your language too you can turn them on turn them off rewind you know be active in your learning i think also it's really important it goes back to not being so hard on yourself as well and understanding that sometimes even we need to watch tv series and movies with subtitles we've spoken about it before but you know depending on the type of accent it's very difficult to understand some tv shows for example peaky blinders like i always watch that show with subtitles because it's a birmingham accent but it's a really strong one you know you won't go to birmingham and it'd be that difficult to understand everybody but the way that they speak in that show is very difficult and you know they mumble as well so all of these things make an impact on whether or not you can understand it very clearly and another one that springs to mind that i was watching recently is brooklyn nine-nine because it's a hilarious show but they speak so fast and especially when they're making all the jokes as well so you really have to pay attention and i'm finding even with that one it's just i think it's a great one to watch if you're an advanced learner because they just they just speak so fast and you really have to focus and pay attention when you're watching that show i didn't even realize i speak that fast i'm brooklyn nine-nine but i definitely feel your pain with uh with the peaky blinders i was the same that i remember i was watching it with subtitles and and i was doing something in the kitchen at the same time and i turned around and i realized because i wasn't watching at that point i wasn't reading the subtitles that i had like had completely missed what they were saying i didn't understand a word of it so i think that kind of again you know recognizing maybe some series will be harder some natives can be harder to understand so you know whether you're watching a tv series or a movie or even when you're meeting with a group of friends and maybe you meet someone new and you're like this person like i thought i understand english well but i can't understand this person at all and just recognizing like maybe that person has an accent maybe they mumble like like andrea was saying or you know maybe it's something else that you're just like not seeing maybe this person likes to use really sophisticated language and he's using like a lot of vocabulary that you're not so accustomed to hearing and any of those factors can just lead you to maybe have like a a slip up like uh you know where you're not going to feel as confident but knowing that if you hang in there and you're patient with yourself that you can't get there i think maybe people have that experience listening to this podcast because i think i'm more difficult to understand in general i'm like level hard the hard level i think i don't know if andrea is like easy level and if ethan's medium level but a lot of people have a hard time understanding me might depend too which accent you're more used to right that's why i think it's so important as well to expose yourself to different accents because i i remember as well sometimes some of my first lessons on learning english with tv series some people that were just used to the american accent we're saying is she speaking english i don't understand her and i was like really i feel like i'm speaking clearly but again it's just the exposure and that's why it's really important to listen to a whole range of accents even americans like i don't know if you've heard this but it's americans are notorious for not understanding british english very well because it's a different accent we don't hear it so much in the united states we don't watch like british tv shows so i think a lot of people like are just kind of shocked when they hear it and that's why they have to do like harry potter and james bond they speak like maybe uh not the most realistic sort of like british english because i think it's somewhat internationalized so that americans can understand it better right definitely it's like some of the characters on the simpsons for example whenever they're british you know it's that very posh british accent or the really cockney one right exactly yeah so i think like definitely just taking all these factors too if you're watching some tv series or movie uh that's like we were saying before that when you first start watching it maybe it'll be really difficult but i think it's this this happens in real life and it happens you know when you're watching any sort of media that is you get used to certain like characters or like hearing certain people even in real life speak that you start to understand better and i think there's maybe some of that kind of like musicality within the language and stuff that it's almost like you're tuning your ears to it and if there's like a delay there between when you first start watching and then your ears actually custom themselves that all of a sudden you might be like on the third or like fifth episode of a show and you're like okay well now now i actually can understand so much more than the first episode and maybe that actually makes series a lot easier to understand the movies because you have more time to kind of get used to these characters and furthermore you can make it like a daily habit because there's so many episodes that too and they're shorter coming home you know like spending 20 minutes or up to an hour you know watching something it's like it's daily practice so you know it's like watching modern family or all seasons of friends or game of thrones it's like how you're spending months months with those tv shows right that's a that's definitely a good point it's almost like you get to you know if you don't actually get to go live in an english-speaking country i think it's so great that you can like watch friends you can watch my family you can watch like any of these shows i think especially sitcoms and you feel like you're getting to know these characters and you're kind of like they're they're your english speaking friends in some sense because you're just you know seeing them every single day and like hearing them speak and whatnot so i think that that can be such a powerful tool in that sense and we have we have 210 episodes so i mean that's probably like over 100 hours so there you go a lot of people write us and they say they listen they've listened to all of them so there you go really great reason to listen to a podcast too if there's a lot of episodes you feel like you get to know those people or those voices in your head and you get more used to their way of speaking you get you can even get to the hard level of being able to understand justin and you know you're kind of like a master of english fluency at that point and i think just like it's the convenience of it also you know if you're watching this on youtube then again highly recommend that you actually like download this and take it with you because if you're just kind of like listening to that every time you're in your car in traffic you're in line at the bank or like any of these other moments it's just kind of like you're filling all your your time by listening to english and just kind of that pure time of exposure is going to make a huge impact so and it doesn't cost you much extra because you're in your car you're doing it at a convenient moment you're killing two birds with one stone or three birds with one stone right totally so i think that probably is a good point to wrap up this episode of the relife english podcast and we will also have like an extra little piece of this lesson that you can check out exclusively over on our instagram where we'll explore these ideas just a little bit more and that's at reallife.english on instagram so we look forward to seeing you over there and for the moment being thanks so much for joining us here on the real life english podcast and we'll see you next week one [Music] [Applause] [Music] don't be a stranger you can find all the notes like vocabulary links and more for this lesson on our blog at reallifeglobal.com and connect with us and on instagram at reallife.english for even more fun english recommendations do you want to continue your learning and get confident fluent english then i have a couple great recommendations for you first of all check out our youtube channel learn english with tv series where you can have fun learning to understand fast speaking natives with your favorite movies series and more without getting lost without missing the jokes and without subtitles second if you like our podcast then our real life native immersion course is perfect for you it is the next best thing to studying abroad in an english-speaking country try it for free with our three-part power learning series just go to reallifeglobal.com pod to sign up finally if you are enjoying our podcast then please assist us in helping more people go beyond the classroom and live their english you can do this by sending a link to this podcast to a friend or by leaving us a five star review wherever you are listening we might even shout you out on the podcast stay healthy and safe and i look forward to seeing you next week ah yeah

Channel: RealLife English

Views: 58,185

Keywords: how to understand movies without subtitles, how to understand movies, how to understand movies better, how to understand movies in english, how to understand english movies, how to understand hollywood movies english, how to understand hollywood movies without subtitles, how to understand without subtitles, understand movies, understand tv, american english, english conversation, english speaking, learn english

Id: ycD1cXvB64c

Length: 41min 22sec (2482 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020