Yes. Absolutely. Don’t believe me?
Everybody knows that too much TV is bad for you. Sure, that’s definitely true.
But, when you want to get natural, authentic, spontaneous fluency in a foreign language, packed with vocabulary and authentic expressions, I say it’s time to ignore that. It’s time to watch more TV. And, like, a lot more.
Tried and Tested: My Story with Portuguese
I started learning Portuguese seriously at the end of June 2021. 7 months later, I can call myself conversationally fluent. How have I done it? I must have worked really hard, and sweated a lot to do that in 7 months, right? I must have sat down for hours with vocabulary lists, and grammar tables, right?
No, not at all. What is my main secret?
I’ve just watched a lot of TV. I’ve binged.
You don’t believe me, do you? Of course not. People don’t learn whole languages by watching TV. Everybody knows that watching TV isn’t productive. So, let me tell you a story to convince you of this contrarian truth.
Do you know what a “nacho” is?
Great. So you know at least one Spanish word.So, suppose you want to learn Spanish, but you know only this one word: “nacho”.
Step 1: Getting beyond the nacho (How do I get from the first word to the second, without studying the second word?)
You’re watching a Netflix series, completely in Spanish. There’s a woman in her apartment, lounging in front of the television. She says:
“¡Me gustan los nachos!”
The character is standing there, holding a nacho, speaking emphatically. She then shoves her face with half a bag, you hear the crunch and then we see a shot of an incredibly cheesy grin, her teeth covered in nacho pieces, salsa, avocado, and an array of hues of various tomato dips.
Right, maybe you don’t know exactly what these other words meant, because you’ve never studied them. But you know that she’s saying something positive about nachos. You know that, clearly, she really likes nachos.
Next, we see that she has many dogs in her apartment. She feeds the rest of the bag to her four dogs and they lick the cheese of the nacho crisps from the palm of her hands.
Step 2: Compounding on the vocabulary we just inferred
In the next episode, you see a grumpy man in his apartment. Why is he grumpy? His neighbour’s dogs are howling. He can’t get to sleep because of the noise. He says:
“No me gustan los perros para nada. Qué perros más estúpidos.”
Now, your brain has passively absorbed a few things. Clearly, this man is upset about the dogs and the noise. You already know from earlier that “me gustan los” means that you like something. This man clearly doesn’t like something. He said:
“No me gustan los perros para nada.”
So now we’ve learned how to say that you don’t like something, and that a dog or dogs is probably “perros” or “perros para nada”.
Step 3: Sometimes you need to hear a word in a few different contexts to infer its meaning, and that’s okay.
Then he gets up, and goes and knocks on his neighbour’s door. It’s the nacho lady. She answers the door covered in bits of nacho flakes. She says:
“¿Sí? ¿Qué quieres?”
looking agitated. We hear the pit-patter of a dog’s paws as she hides a dog behind the door. The dog is tugging at her hand. The man says:
“No puedes tener mascotas en este edificio. Va en contra de las normas.”
You understand nothing at all. You keep watching.
Then she says, sheepily and defensively:
“No, no hay nada aquí.”
She points to her seemingly empty, dog-free, apartment with nachos scattered across the floor. We hear a whimper from the other side of the door, followed by a series of crunches as the dog treads on pieces of nacho.
Clearly, she’s just tried to hide the fact that she has a dog in the apartment. Multiple dogs. Earlier we learned that “perros para nada” might mean dogs, or a certain kind of dog. Now we know that “nada” can be used in dog-free contexts. So it’s not a dog-related word. Here, it must mean something like “empty”, “nothing”, “none” or “definitely not”. Then we hear:
“¿Perro? ¿Qué perro? Yo no tengo ningún perro.”
This confirms that “perro” is the word for a dog. Also, we’ve inferred that “perros” must be multiple dogs, and “Yo no tengo ningún [something]” must mean that you don’t have something, or that there isn’t any of something. You deduce that she has said, probably, that there’s nothing here, and she doesn’t have any dogs, because it was pretty obvious from the context.
And just like that, you’ve done zero studying and yet you’ve learned a whole host of basic expressions in common Spanish parlance. How?
Because, when we started, you already knew what a “nacho” is. That’s it.
The Science behind it: Comprehensible Input
Stephen Krashen, professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California, has devoted his career to studying the science of language learning. But Krashen doesn’t call it “learning”: he calls it “acquisition”. Why? Because getting fluent in a language is not something we do with conscious effort, study and dedication. It’s not something we do consciously.
Trust Yourself: your inference powers are stronger than you think.
“Comprehensible input” is a technical term, but it basically means the following: why were all of these bits of a new language within your reach? Well, not only did you know the word “nacho” but you some basic facts about the world:
- People often binge-eat foods they really like.
- Some neighbours are grumpy old gits who hate noisy animals.
- Some apartment blocks don’t allow pets.
- Often people lie when they think they’re in trouble.
And yet, these things have absolutely nothing to do with studying Spanish.
So, if you want to build up your vocabulary, watch Netflix. Lots of Netflix. Your brain will start to pick up words, and expressions, from context, from the groundwork you already have. This “groundwork” will be a combination of any words or expressions you already know in the language, and the huge background knowledge you have about the way the world works, and how people interact with each other in certain situations.
Then, before you know it, these words and expressions will be falling off your tongue and you’re not even sure how they got in your head in the first place: somehow, you just know that they’re the right words, and you know how to use them. Just like all those words and expressions you never studied in your mother tongue. Your inference powers are much stronger than you think, and you can use them to get that fluency you dream of. Trust me: I’ve done it.
Concluding Remarks
When it comes to learning languages, I take quite a radical position: we try way too hard. We go to formal classes every week, we sit and study from textbooks for hours on end, we memorise long lists of vocabulary, and we try to wrap our heads around complex grammar tables.
Don’t get me wrong: there are some people out there who really like that stuff: the nerds, the people with great memories, and the grammar junkies. But they’re a minority. Chances are high that you’re not like that. Your mouth doesn’t begin to water at the thought of lapping up hours of cold, dry textbooks or trying to shove long lists of foreign words into your brain. And here’s the good news: maybe, to get your hands on that dream of fluency, you don’t have to.
Itching for more?
If you’re interested in learning more about Krashen’s method, I recommend this book:
If you’d like to sink your teeth into his dense theory, you can find his main work “Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition” here.
To hear polyglots speaking on this topic, I highly recommend Aleksandra Stepien’s “Netflix and Chill like a Boss“.
Or you can just take my word for it, and try it out myself while you await my next blog post. In the comments, let me know which of the following you’d like me to write about next:
- Sure, so I can make all of these inferences, but how do I remember these new terms?
- What a “lexical item” is and why you need to know about it
- How to improve your pronunciation in a foreign language
- Okay, I’m sold on this “comprehensible input” idea. Should I watch series or movies?
- How to learn a language without willpower
- Can I just watch Netflix to learn a language, and do nothing else?
Here are some of my earliest blog posts to inspire you:
Help! I want to speak a language but I hate studying it
Yearning to Learn a Language for No Good Reason