- Why are films difficult to understand in English?
(jaunty music)
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening.
I'm Julian Northbrook and this is Doing English.
Good question I got recently,
why are films difficult to understand in English?
It's a good question.
And well, clearly there is not any
single one answer to the question.
People are different and the reasons why
you may not understand a film
or indeed, anything in English
may be slightly different, depending on you,
how you've learned English, what you've learned
and a whole range of factors.
But generally speaking, in my experience
there are two very very common reasons
why people may fail to fully comprehend
or understand anything in English, films included.
The first reason is that you may be consciously
trying to understand everything as it unfolds in the film.
That is you're sitting, you're watching the film,
you're listening to the English,
you're trying to understand
and you're doing that consciously.
In your head you're translating everything that you hear
into your first language in order to understand it
or you're consciously trying to remember
the meanings of words or process,
the grammar that you're hearing
and everything that is happening in your head
is a conscious process that are you are
actually doing and thinking about.
Now if that is the case and if that is you,
then you don't stand a hope in hell
of being able to understand properly.
Even a native speaker wouldn't be able to understand
at the speed that we naturally speak at
if they are consciously processing
everything in their heads.
Because that's simply not how we use English
or indeed any language.
Now the problem here is that most people
have been taught English in a way that
encourages them to consciously think
about everything in their head.
Think about the way that you learned English at school
and the way that you were punished for making mistakes
and you therefore spent more time thinking about
what you were doing and you've probably,
over time learned a very bad habit
whereby you are thinking consciously
about everything that you're doing.
And unless you can break that habit,
well you're not gonna get very far
with understanding about films
or indeed anything, you need to break it.
The second reason and this is a very very common one
is that that quite simply, you probably haven't learned
the English that you need to understand a film.
Again, this is very very common.
And in my own PhD research, I looked very closely at this.
I researched the relationship between
the materials that people used to learn from
and the English that they develop from that.
And I studied the group of students
who didn't seem to have gotten good at English at all.
Their teacher said they failed.
They spend all these years learning English
and they haven't picked anything up.
But the reality was that they were actually quite
quite fluent in the English that they learned.
It's just that the English contained in their
textbooks was totally useless for real life.
They learned English that they didn't need basically.
And when people spoke to them in English
or when they had to speak themselves,
they didn't know what to say.
And didn't know what people were saying
because it was English they hadn't learned.
Now that's an extreme example.
But I see this all the time.
People wanna get good at conversational English.
They wanna be able understand conversational English.
They wanna be able to speak conversational English.
The kind of English that you hear in a film.
So what are they doing to improve?
They are studying the vocabulary in newspapers.
But that actually doesn't make any sense at all.
Because the vocabulary in newspapers
is, well, newspaper talk.
And unless you wanna speak like a news presenter,
then well, that's not particularly helpful, is it?
Simply but if you wanna get good at understanding films
or again any kind of conversational English cause
that's what films are, spoken conversational English.
Then well, that's what you need to be focusing on.
You need to find materials that gonna help you
to get good at spoken conversational English.
Studying things like newspapers or textbooks
that are not designed for that specific purpose
aren't gonna get you to where you need to be.
Now the question is then, what is the best method to use
so that you can learn to speak English in English
without having think about it in your native language.
What should you be studying?
What should you be learning?
What should you be focusing on?
That my friend is what you're gonna learn in my book.
Master English Fast, an uncommon guide
to speaking extraordinary English.
This bad boy takes you step by simple step
through the English improvement process
and shows you, the intermediate or advance
English learner exactly what you need
to do to get really really good at English.
Link in the description or MasterEnglishFast.com.
Look, I'll be brutally honest.
Getting good at English is not difficult.
Learning to understand films.
Learning to speak yourself in conversation is not hard.
In fact, it's very very simple.
But most people have picked up
a little bad habits over the years.
Methods that simply don't work,
that are not designed to do what they want to do.
And if you're not getting the results
that you want by doing what you are doing now,
doing more of it is not gonna help.
You need to change the way that you learn
so that you change the results that you get.
That is something what we're gonna
talk about more in a future video.
But in the meantime, this is me, your beloved host,
Julian Northbrook signing off from another video.
Take care, don't get caught doing
anything that I wouldn't do
and I'll see you in the next one, Bu-bye.
Before I go, are you feeling overwhelmed
by the massive whale that is English?
If you wanna know how to break it down to bite-size chunks,
you gonna wanna watch this video right here.
And if you're not sure about how to go about
practising English all by yourself,
watch this video right here.
Enjoy.