Obviously, strictly, yes. I’m sure one could learn Spanish just by reading Spanish-language NYC Subway ads. But what about as a practical matter? If I watch Univision and Telemundo for the next year, will I likely be able to understand (and perhaps speak) Spanish? Would I do better if I watch Spanish dubs of shows/movies I’m already quite familiar with? I’m thinking Buffy DVDs (with the Spanish audio track), or maybe catching movies I’ve already seen in English on HBO-L.
Has anyone here successfully learned another language in this manner? I was inspired after reading the WSJ article about the high academic performance of Finnish students (and how one girl noted that she learned to read very quickly by watching Finnish-subtitled Beverly Hills 90210).
Anecdote does not equal data, but aren’t there a few athletes who claim to have learned English from watching TV? For some reason Vlade Divac formerly of the Lakers comes to mind as having said he learned English from watching the Flintstones, so I suppose it’s possible.
Doing so won’t give you any grammar, but it may very well give you basic conversational skills. I know my fluency in Spanish, such as it is, increases quite a bit after I watch Univision for awhile.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili, a native of Poland born of Georgian parents, claimed to have learned English from John Wayne movies.
I credit my fluency mostly to watching Uga Uga years ago. Granted, I had a Spanish speaking wife, but there’s nothing like steady, constant exposure to the world outside the household for a full spectrum of learning.
I think it was Telemundo. It was a Brazilian-dubbed-into-Spanish comedy telenovela. Wish I could get it on DVD.
Jackie Chan says that he learned English in the 1980s during his first attempt at breaking into Hollywood by locking himself in his hotel room and watching commercials all day long.
If there’s enough context to be able to guess at what they might be talking about, then I’d say yes, it ought to be possible. If you had no knowledge of the language and were just watching talking heads news/interview programmes, then it might not be.
My mother moved to the US when she was 28 and became fluent enough in English to work as a welfare case worker for SS around 10 years later. She never took any formal language classes (apart from the ones she took in high school and college back in Korea) and she tells me that most of what she learned came from soap operas. It’s interesting because she didn’t really have a lot of interaction with English speakers compared to my dad, who attended grad school in the US and also had a steady job at various American universities after that - my mom worked for Korean-owned businesses until she got the SS job. Yet to this day my mother is a much more fluent speaker than my father when it comes to English.
Our first babysitter learned enough Spanish from TV to be able to understand her favorite telenovelas. She already spoke Portuguese, though. Apparently it’s easier for a Portuguese speaker to understand Spanish than the other way around.
My ability to read and understand (but not speak or write) Spanish also increases when I watch telenovelas with closed captioning on.
However, it’s not that often that I meet amnesiacs who are secretly pregnant with their married boss’s (who is currently unjustly imprisoned for embezzling) babies. So, it isn’t always the most useful Spanish
For what it’s worth, I’ve found that while TV can help you get from intermediate speaker to advanced, there’s nothing like having to converse to improve your fluency. When I’m watching the tube in French, if I miss something, I also miss the next couple of lines while I’m trying to sort out what I didn’t catch. When I’m speaking to someone, I can always ask them to repeat, and if necessary, explain what I didn’t understand. Other people’s experiences may differ, but I don’t think I could learn another language solely from watching the box.
Reading, on the other hand, I have found to be immensely useful.
I came into this thread to post more or less what was said above.
I would also add that I don’t believe you could learn to speak Spanish (or any other language) fluently only by watching TV. Having said that, I believe that television, movies, songs, radio, print, can all be extremely useful tools for learning a language, especially when you aren’t immersed in the language. I think that a well-balanced combination of conversational practice, study and media intake is a good way to go.
Watching TV should give you all the grammar you need. You might not learn it in a chart paradigm or what have you, but it’s all there.
Re: the OP, I think the biggest major pitfall in this method would be that your production skills would be stunted. If you augmented it by attempting conversations with people (I don’t know if this is cheating) in Spanish it would be much more effective.
I was in Kosovo with an NGO and we had a young guy in his 20’s who was our interpreter. He spoke nearly perfect English with hardly any accent. We asked him how he learned English. He said that he worked in a video store and watched English speaking movies all day. Eventually he “got it.”
I think it does. Most Scandinavians are pretty good at English and other foreign languages. A lot of that comes with the fact that we don’t get dubbed versions of foreign movies and tv-shows. The same is true for the Dutch. In Germany and France on the other hand, they dub all (or most) movies and tv, and the are (usually) not as fluent in English as the Scandinavians.
As for picking up a language from tv without subtitles, I think that is possible, too. Many Danes (myself included) have a pretty good knowledge of German and Swedish from watching kid’s shows and stuff like that. Exposure always helps.
More anecdotage. My friend claimed he acquired a good understanding of Czech having sat at home every evening watching tv for a few hours while he lived in Prague for a year or two. Obviously the immersion must have helped but he didn’t attend any Czech language lessons while there.
Assuming you’re not starting off cold and have at least a rudimentary grasp on the language, that sort of cultural immersion would definitely help with conversational skills, as some have said already.
My Spanish improves dramatically after watching any Spanish-language movie or TV show (especially if I’ve got subtitles to help me through the first few minutes while my mental hamsters are still revving up on their wheels). However, the same couldn’t be said if the movie was in a language that I have absolutely no prior exposure to, such as Polish or Japanese.
I’m like cher3’s sitter - native speaker of Portuguese, which has a lot of crossover with Spanish, especially in re: to grammatical structure and vocabulary, hence my ability to pick it up with a brief exposure.
If you dont mind exposing yourself to Spanish with a Mexican accent, see if the Telefutura outlet in your market is still broadcasting “Plaza Sesamo.”
It’s a kids show with a format and characters you might already be fairly familiar with: Abelardo Montoya (Big Bird), Beto & Enrique (Bert & Ernie), Pancho (Oscar the Grouch), etc.