I learned English by Watching TV— Two Simple Rules for Learning any Language

Get Anki and listen — a lot.

Anki

Last year I found a Youtube video about a German girl who learned English with an American accent. It confirmed what I’ve learned about language learning — we’re overcomplicating it.

It’s taken me four years to get a decent handle on Spanish. I could’ve learned in half the time or less if so many guides and tips didn’t give bad advice.

Learning a language is a simple process. You hear phrases over and over again and then you repeat them. Voila, you now speak a language.

The problem, your hearing sucks. The brain tunes out languages that you don’t know. You’re not used to those foreign sounds and everything ends up sounding like static. You won’t know when a word begins and when another ends. And that will be painfully frustrating for months or well over a year.

The solution — daily repetition of audio sounds. For example, Anki has a Spanish audio file with over 7500 phrases. You hear the audio and then read the written phrase and the English translation.

Hearing phrases in context is the fastest and best way to learn. No one speaks in single nouns. I wasted my first year learning individual words like dog and boy when I should have been listening to audio that said, “ That boy walked his dog yesterday.”

You also need to hear phrases hundreds of times for it to sink into your brain and become familiar to you.

Stay away from Anki lists, Duolingo games, and even conjugation lists. You don’t need to spend a year learning how to conjugate verbs. You don’t need a list of the the most 500 commonly used words. If you are listening to your target language and watching TV then those words and phrases will pop up anyway.

A language teaches itself.

Listen to the right accent

You need to listen a lot but no one tells you what to listen to. You should be listening to two or three accents at most. Every language has several accents and if you don’t listen to the right ones you will get confused and slow down your language learning.

Listening is the only way you get used to the sound of a language and the only way you can repeat back (speak) what you hear and be understood by the person listening to you.

The first or second accent you should listen to will be the one most common in your area or the one you plan to come into the most contact. I live in Miami. My first or second priority should have been listening to Cuban Spanish. I wasted my first six months of Spanish watching Amo Despertar Contigo, a Mexican soap opera.

Another example, Indian English can sound almost unintelligible to most Americans. If you are a non-English speaker and plan on moving to India, don’t waste your time watching British movies, watch Bollywood.

The next accent will be the accent you understand the most. This is the accent you lean on when you feel like quitting, when you don’t have the motivation to keep listening to noises in another language that you don’t understand. If Shanghai Mandarin is too difficult, switch to the Beijing accent. This way, you are not giving up, you give your brain a break while still learning in your target language.

This will usually be the accent that even native speakers recognize as the slowest and clearest. In America that would be the Midwestern accent or Californian accent. In Spanish it would be the Rola accent in Bogota, Colombia. You will also find slower and clearer speech by watching the news.

Do an online search and find out what native accent is the clearest accent. But ultimately, it’s your brain and your ears so you’ll have to spend a week or two watching different YouTube videos or Netflix shows before you figure out which sounds clearest to you.

The last accent will be the one you admire the most or want to adopt. Not everyone wants to speak with a native accent. For those that do, the melody or rhythm of an accent can be a huge motivator. If British English is music to your ears James Bond movies may be your new best friend.

How to Listen

Watch the same TV shows over and over again. If it doesn’t have captions, don’t watch it. Watch with subtitles in the target language, then watch it with subtitles in your language, then close your eyes and listen to the show (listening is easier with your eyes closed), and then switch back to the captions in the target language. Netflix and YouTube is perfect for this.

If it doesn’t have captions don’t watch it.

The first Spanish phrase I learned was, “Que estas haciendo?” — what are you doing. You could say that phrase to me at any accent at any speed and I’d understand exactly what you mean.

Slow down the video speed to 0.75 at most. Foreign languages sound like the speaker is talking too fast but you will get used to it. Your brain is in sensory overload, it can’t keep up with the moving pictures on the screen and foreign words that you haven’t heard hundred and thousands of times before.

Don’t try to understand, try to hear.

It’s okay to look up words here and there but set a limit. Tell your self you will only look up a certain number of words a day and even then it’s better to look up the entire phrase. Get comfortable with not knowing what is being said and what is being talked about and eventually things will start to make sense.

Good luck on your language journey.