How To Watch Spanish Movies For maximum Benefit

If you wish to fight, you need to practice; reading about techniques alone won’t help. Similarly, reading about easy Spanish learning techniques alone is not going to make you speak or understand natural Spanish ever. Even if you can read Spanish perfectly well, you’ll most likely have a square, cookie-cutter accent if the only input you received was the one from those studio-recorded DVDs and tapes off expensive language courses. This is where Spanish language cinema step in to the rescue. They give you an input of Spanish the way it is meant to be spoken in real, with real accent and real pace by real Spanish speakers!

How movies help

Movies give you the context for new vocabulary
Photo credit: gregpoo licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

If the only reason you ever decide to watch a Spanish flick, do make sure that you pick a title that you enjoy – really enjoy – enough to watch even a million times even if only to make fun of the story or direction. Good or bad is irrelevant as long as it has the potential to engage you. Because you are going to watch it a zillion times so as to absorb the last drop of Spanish it has to offer. Even if you start with subtitles – which, needless to say, must be in Spanish – you must repeat the movie enough number of times to be able to watch it comfortable without any subtitles and without sacrificing on understanding any frame. Let’s see what you gain from this most entertaining form of learning Spanish:

Fluency – Spanish movies not only load with tons of new conversational idioms and phrases, but also give you the ever-important context helping you understand their essense more closely. If you have the propensity for talking to yourself and chanting catchy lines from the movies like many do, you can start sounding pretty convincing pretty soon.

Vocabulary – Must we illustrate what you stand to gain after listening to the same set of words a few thousand times over? Despite no conscious effort on your part, you tend to absorb an incredible amount of Spanish vocabulary out of these repeat sessions, not to mention the fact that the words you acquire are of the best quality as far as practical Spanish is concerned.

Grammar – The spookiest beast of all that has driven countless Spanish learners into quitting their programs prematurely! The context provided by the movie and the insane number of reps work together in cementing some of the most complicated of grammatical concepts into your minds, thus helping you speak with near-native fluency and confidence when the time comes.

Conversational context – After watching the same sequence of events so many times over, you have acquired situational images that easily relate with your newly absorbed words, phrases, and grammar. You’ll easily recall that a barretta means a crowbar if you remember that scene where someone is trying to pry open a trunk and yells, “Pásame la barretta.” And what dictionary or phrasebook would give you the Spanish for “crowbar” anyways?

You don’t need a colossal collection before you start

Even one movie can work wonders with your conversational skills in Spanish. We can bet you’ll sound much more confident and natural in your speech if you employ what you absorbed from just one movie in your next conversation than if you had spent all that time listening to some computer program playing a studio recording of, “Me llamo Anita, ¿como estás?” You have heard Spanish the way it’s meant to be spoken in reality, at a realistic pace, with realistic intonations. Nothing can ever reinforce your Spanish better than this.

Other than this reinforcement, movies are also rich in tons of colloquial phrases and constructs that are skipped by most formal courses and textbooks. No matter what language you learn, you cannot expect to be taken seriously with your conversational skills if you speak the language strictly as mandated by the books. Slangs and colloquialisms are an essential aspect of any natural language and Spanish is no exception. And there’s no richer source of these than Spanish cinema. The amount of street Spanish you assimilate from even a single movie is worth every rep it takes. Not only because you learn the slang, but also the ready-made context that gives you a better sense of what it means and how and when it is meant to be used. Needless to say, the memorable visuals make remembering them a breeze.

Resources

There are enough number of websites that can give you a reasonable load of news and trivia on Spanish showbiz. We would suggest that you bookmark these sites if you wish to keep up with the latest goings on in the world of Hispanic cinema.

Buscacine – A Spanish-language search engine solely dedicated to movies

Zinema – A rich presentation of the news and notes from the world of Hispanic cinema

Cinegaños – A Spanish-language film portal edited simultaneously in Barcelona and Mexico City; great for unbiased reviews

Como Hacer Cine – A wholesome portal with a wide array of articles, news, and reviews from the Spanish showbiz

Do note, however, that each of the above-listed sites is in Spanish and practicing your reading skills will go a long way helping you understand what they have to say. While you can always translate the entire page using Google Translate®, you will not be helping your learning program much in doing so. Translation always kills the essence of the original content.