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Consuming any kind of media in your target language can help take your abilities to the next level. Yes, even TV and movies: now more than ever. With the ever growing number of Netflix Originals, the average language learner now has countless hours of juicy goodness right at her fingertips.

Woah there, hold on! Don’t go running for your remote just yet. Watching Netflix in a foreign language can be just as unproductive as watching The Office for the seventh time in a row if you’re not careful.

Making the most of language learning and chill

Keep your finger off of the pause button

Stop it. Right now. You’re ruining one of the main benefits of this language learning exercise without realizing it; you’re boring the hell out of yourself.

Stopping to translate every new word is counter-productive. This may seem unintuitive at first. After all, one of the most important parts of learning a new language is the vocabulary, right?

That’s correct, but you’re robbing your brain of the opportunity to decipher the new words and phrases through context clues. Furthermore, the fun part of your brain is throwing a tantrum because you’re pausing. every. other. second.

See what I mean?

Concentrate during your next TV language learning session, and try to remember the most frequently appearing words you didn’t understand. Look them up afterwards. If a word pops up five or more times while you’re watching, you get a pass to pause and look them up real quick.

You may be surprised to find that you learned much more than you thought you would have.

Turn on the subtitles

Teaching experience has shown me that a substantial amount of language learners fall into one of the two following categories:

“Subtitles? Bah. More like: cheat-titles. You know what I mean?”

“Subtitles? Yeah I love them! I turn them on in my native language so I actually understand what I’m watching.”

Neither of these viewpoints are particularly productive. The former leads to quick frustration and burnout. The latter prevents you from learning much of anything at all.

Sure, if you are just beginning a language, subtitles in your native language might be necessary for you to understand anything at all. More advanced learners might understand everything without blinking an eye. In either of these cases: stop to ask yourself, “is this content really on my level?”

Using subtitles in your native language gives your brain a crutch that it is delighted to lean on. Instead of paying attention to the foreign language, most learners find that it quickly becomes just background noise, distracting from text at the bottom of the screen.

Instead, use subtitles and audio in your target language. This will enable you to catch all of the tricky words that try to sneak past your ears, and likely understand significantly more than you would have without them.

You will find yourself less likely to become bored, and will come out of the experience having learned more.

Don’t shy away from dubs

Just like with subtitles, it can be very easy to get into the elitist mindset of only wanting to watch shows in your target language when it is also the original language. Many times, however, we don’t have that luxury.

Sometimes, a dubbed version can even be better than an original! In a dub, you certainly lose the aspect of accurate mouth movements, but you gain slower and clearer speech.

Watching dubbed versions of shows that you have access to is significantly more productive than not watching any at all.