Should You Use Subtitles to Learn English?

When you are learning English, like learning anything to improve your skills, you need practice and experience. And a popular way to get that in English is by watching films and television. But there is one question that many learners have.

Should I use subtitles? In this video, I'm going to answer that question and also tell you the best settings for your subtitles to make your learning as effective as possible. Let's start by asking an important question.

Why can't you understand what people are saying in films and television series? It might seem like the reason is really obvious. Your English isn't good enough.

But the reality is more complicated. There are actually two other things that can cause problems with understanding: language delivery and language content. Let's take a closer look at the first one.

It's important to remember that all modern video content including Netflix and YouTube, started with cinema and celluloid film. And at the beginning cinema was silent because audio recording technology literally didn't exist. But during the 1920s, new technology made it possible to record and distribute sound and we could hear people speaking on-screen for the first time.

But microphone technology was still very basic. The first microphones were not very sensitive, so actors had to speak loudly and directly towards the microphone and pronounce their words carefully. But over time the technology has improved so much that this is the size of a modern microphone.

Tiny microphones like this are used to record sound in Hollywood films, and they are extremely sensitive. They can record the loudest shout and the quietest whisper. And as the technology has changed so has the way that actors act.

Actors now have the freedom to speak in any way they want and many of them take advantage of that freedom. In a modern film, you can expect to hear all types of voice variation including mumbling, whispering and shouting. So what are the real-world consequences of this?

The main one is that films and series have become objectively more difficult to understand, and not just for learners. Various different surveys and viewing statistics show that between 50 and 85 percent of native speakers use subtitles. And that includes me.

I have been speaking English for more than 45 years. I'm an English teacher with experience in many different styles and types of English, and I regularly need to use subtitles. In fact, it's become such a problem that it is now a common meme on social media.

Look at this example: And remember that these are native speakers of English with a literal lifetime of language experience not foreign learners. There is one more technical reason that language on your television can be hard to understand. And it's the same reason that listening tests can be so hard in the classroom because the audio is one-dimensional.

You see, in the real world, when we are having a conversation, we experience audio in three dimensions. For example, a person might be speaking directly in front of you, and on the left you have the sound of traffic, and behind you there is some music playing. Our brains are able to use this spatial information to essentially cancel out some of that noise.

And help you to focus on the voice of the person speaking. But when you watch television, the person's voice, the traffic sound, and the music is all coming from the same place: the speakers in your television. Which makes it much harder for your brain to separate the sounds which makes it harder to understand in general.

Now let's move away from the technical and talk about the second thing. Language content. If there is one word that characterizes modern film and TV production it would be: authenticity.

Modern audiences expect content that is as true to life as possible. If I'm watching a film about police in New York, I expect the characters to talk like real police officers in New York. If I'm watching a film about teenagers in London, I expect them to talk like real teenagers in London.

As a consequence, you can find low frequency vocabulary, regional accents, and cultural references that can create real barriers to understanding. For example, look at this transcript from a popular American Netflix series: Firstly, there are 4 pieces of specialist vocabulary that you might not know. Looking at word frequency, none of these words are in the top 5000.

In fact, bandana is not even in the top 10,000 most-frequent words in English. And then there are two cultural references. The first one is ‘Nam, which is an abbreviation of Vietnam, but it specifically refers to the Vietnam War.

The second one is Wrist Rocket, which is an American brand name for a device called a slingshot. Unless you have deep cultural knowledge of the USA, it's unlikely that you will know either of these references. Once you stop and analyze the language, it's easy to see why understanding every word in conversation is like this can be the work of a lifetime.

And this is a great moment to talk about mindset. As a learner, when you can't understand what someone says in a film, you might think: when a native speaker can't understand, they might think: But mostly native speakers don't think anything at all because they don't expect to understand everything. If you want to be able to understand everything in films and TV series, then you will need to know everything.

English, like any other language, doesn't work by magic, and native speakers don't have superpowers. The way we learn new language is either through contact, context, or deliberate study. And the way we know new language is through repetition.

You are simply not going to know what something means if you've never heard it before. And even if you have heard it before, you might have forgotten it because you only heard it once. This doesn't reflect your language ability or your intelligence.

It simply reflects the way that the human brain works. But you probably punish yourself for not understanding and think that your English abilities aren't good enough. Now is the time to stop that.

I hope I've demonstrated that understanding films and television is a complex task. So please don't punish yourself for simply being human. Now that we have talked about why you can't understand what people are saying, let's talk about whether subtitles are good or bad for learning.

The short answer is: yes, they are good, but with one important exception that I'll tell you about later in this video. But multiple studies have shown that subtitles improve comprehension, vocabulary, learning, literacy, and even pronunciation. They can help you to adapt to specific varieties of English like Scottish or Australian English.

And more importantly, they don't affect your listening skills in any negative way. The reason that subtitles work is very simple. There is a lot of evidence that our brain divides and processes information in 2 distinct types: audio and visual.

And both of these types of information can be connected to a concept. The more connections we have to a concept, the easier it is to remember and use it. So the concept of pizza could be connected to the sound pizza, and also a visual image of a pizza, and the visual image of the word pizza.

Remember that writing, including subtitles, is a form of visual information. So when we watch something with subtitles, we are getting both the audio and the visual information that helps us to process, understand, and learn the language. But as I said, there is one exception, and that is learners with a lower level of language ability.

While the evidence shows that all this extra information can be good for learners who have sufficient language ability to process it all, the evidence also shows that it will have the opposite effect if your language skills aren't good enough. If subtitles make you feel stressed or lost, they're not helping. And the end result will be zero learning and probably lots of negative emotions.

In that case, switch to subtitles in your own language or change to more simple content. Please remember that learning is not a process of suffering. Learning a language takes thousands of hours and you will not succeed unless you have the right mindset.

Forcing yourself into uncomfortable and unproductive learning situations is only going to lead you to failure. And that brings us to the next question: What are the best subtitles settings to get the most effective language learning? When you're watching English-speaking content there are three possible audio and subtitle combinations: English audio with English subtitles, English audio with subtitles in your native language, and audio in your native language with English subtitles.

The evidence from learners in controlled conditions is really clear. The best combination for learning is the first one: English audio with English subtitles. But again, remember to be careful if you are a lower-level learner.

You might find English audio and English subtitles is just too much information and you might find it more effective to use English audio, but with subtitles in your native language. I want to finish this video by saying something important. Although films and television might seem like authentic content because they are a product of English-speaking culture, the reality is that the language used in film and television is nothing like the language that people use in the real world.

Conversations between actors are almost always too perfect. They usually contain no hesitations, pauses, repetitions, corrections, or spontaneous changes of topic. Film language isn't authentic English.

It's authentic film English. It has no personal context. If you are using films or television to prepare yourself for the real world, you might be disappointed.

There is no substitute for the act of using language to communicate with real people about the things that are important to you. The reason that humans developed the art of motion pictures is because we are storytelling creatures. We have been telling each other stories for thousands of years, and we will continue to do it until our species disappears.

The magic of film and television is the way that image and sound combine to tell those stories and create meaning. The magic of language is the same. You can use signs, text, or sound to create meaning and tell your stories.

When you do that, you become part of the thousands of generations of humans before you who passed down that magic of language. Please don't waste that magic. I'm Christian, this is Canguro English, and I'll see you in class.