can watching films help you learn a language?
a film is speech with its situation attached. you see who is talking, to whom, in what room and in what mood, and that lets you follow far more than the words you know. so films can help, and the research on them points to one choice that matters more than which film you pick: the language of the subtitles. subtitles in your own language carry you through the story but can get in the way of hearing. subtitles in the film's language help you hear, once you can read them quickly enough. watched more than once, in the right order, a film gives you a great deal. watched once, in your own language, it mostly gives you the plot.
what a scene does for a listener
ordinary listening asks you to work out meaning from sound alone. a scene gives you the face, the gesture, the object being pointed at, the door someone has just closed. much of what a line means is on the screen before it is in your ear, and that is exactly the support a listener in a new language lacks.
there is evidence that this turns into words learned. in a 2018 study, elke peters and stuart webb had dutch-speaking learners of english watch a single full-length television programme, then tested whether they had picked up words from it without being told to. they had, both in recalling what words meant and in recognising their meanings. the gains were larger for words that came up more often, for words that resembled dutch, and for viewers who already knew more english. one programme is a small dose, and the viewers were already learning english. the finding is that watching is not wasted, not that it is enough.
your language or theirs
the clearest work on subtitles is a 2009 study by holger mitterer and james mcqueen. dutch students with good english, but no experience of scottish or australian accents, watched twenty-five minutes of either trainspotting or the australian sitcom kath & kim. some had dutch subtitles, some english subtitles, some none. afterwards everyone listened to short audio clips in both accents and repeated what they heard.
the group with english subtitles did best, on clips they had heard and on new ones. the group with dutch subtitles beat the group with no subtitles on clips they had already heard, but on new clips they fell behind it, only just ahead of listeners who had never heard the accent at all. the authors' explanation is that subtitles in the film's language show you which words, and so which sounds, are being spoken, while subtitles in your own language give you the meaning and the wrong sound shapes to go with it.
a 2013 study of 226 flemish university students watching short french clips points the same way: full french captions helped their grasp of the overall content more than no captions or captions of keywords only. both studies, though, were of people who could already read the language on screen at speed. mitterer and mcqueen say plainly that subtitles in your own language are essential for anyone who does not yet speak the language at all.
the order that uses both
put together, the research suggests a sequence rather than a rule. watch a film first with subtitles in your own language, so the story is no longer the question. watch it again, or one scene of it, with subtitles in the film's language, and notice where the sound and the words part company. then watch that scene with no subtitles, and see how much of it the situation and your memory now carry. a familiar film used this way gives you something rare: speech you can follow without having to understand every word of it first.
what a subtitle quietly changes
it helps to know that a subtitle is not a transcript. it is a translation written to be read in a second or two, and it changes things to stay readable. darcy paquet, who subtitled parasite into english with bong joon-ho, has described two of his choices. a dish named for a blend of two instant-noodle brands became "ramdon", a word he made up from ramyeon and udon. a joke about seoul national university became a joke about oxford, because, as he put it, for humour to work people need to understand it immediately.
both are good subtitles, and neither is what was said. if you are listening as well as reading, these are the places where the sound and the page part company. noticing them is part of learning to hear the film rather than read it.
where films fall short
a film is scripted, edited and often heightened, and one viewing of it is a couple of hours of speech, some of it under music or effects. its value comes from return: the same scene, more than once, until the speech in it is familiar. a new film every night, watched once with subtitles in your own language, is an evening well spent and very little contact with the language's sound.
from the semi-basement
driftspeak is subtitles for your ears. vol. 19 is built around bong joon-ho's parasite: fourteen tracks of short korean sentences from the film's world, from a wifi signal that keeps dropping and boxes to fold to a job interview and a family dinner. each sentence is said in korean and then in english. it is the film's world without the subtitle, with the meaning said aloud beside each line.
start with the wifi: listen to a sample of the opening track of vol. 19, which begins on 와이파이 안 돼 ("the wifi's not working."), a line in which the first word you catch may be one you already know.