Can an average person learn a truly foreign language just by watching a native language TV station?

Factual Questions
1

I like surfing the internet for weird foreign TV stations sometimes just to see what they are like. One of my favorites is an Icelandic station that has good production values and is roughly like an American version of PBS (documentaries, serious talk shows and news that can be followed sometimes based on the images but almost all of it is in Icelandic).

I obviously can’t speak Icelandic or any related language at all. Let’s say that I was confined to a prison or house arrest and my only entertainment was one foreign language TV station in Icelandic or say, Finnish or Hungarian. I have to stay for ten years and can either watch that TV station or count spots on the wall the entire time.

How well would I be able to understand or speak the language on the TV station at the end? There are no dictionaries, other reference materials and no live contact with anyone that speaks the language.

2

Does the station show the Icelandic version of Sesame Street? I have to imagine you could get some very basic fluency by watching kids shows (where they speak slowly, use simple words, show pictures to go with the words, etc.). But past a certain level I have no idea.

3

I know Latinos that have learned English and converse very well. And they learned it from watching movies in English. However, they had a great desire to learn it. And that is the key.

4

Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie, was on The Graham Norton Show last week and said this is how she learned English. She said when she did press for the movie (in 2009) she had no idea what everyone was saying to her, so she set out to learn English by watching a ton of TV. Hearing her speak now, you’d have thought it was a language she learned alongside Swedish.

She said she also learned Icelandic when she lived in Iceland for just a few years as a youngster, so she might just have an affinity for language.

5

I learned Spanish from watching Novelas and Spanish children’s shows. But I’m also native bilingual Italian, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. When my cousin was here from Italy, he actually turned on the closed captions on the Television and was able to comprehend a lot more than by just listening to the dialogue. I do it with some foreign films that allow you to view the captions in the original language. I know enough of the source language, but the added text clears up the rough spots…

What where you thinking of doing? Or is just a hypothetical situation? Spanish would be pretty easy as there are so many Spanish language stations now in the US (if that’s where you are); both over the air and on cable/satellite. Also, You Tube has some very good resources of native speakers giving ‘classes’. I LOVE the Chinese ones. You actually do learn something.

6

I’m doing the German Duolingo course, but I’m also watching episodes of Die Sendung mit die Maus and subscribed to a German-language podcast on a subject I’m interested in. Don’t k now if it’s helping; mostly it’s to measure my progress, as I hope to be able to understand progressively more of them.

7

You probably will be able to figure out some of the language through context and repetition. Now if you watch an Urdu TV programme and see Obama being referred to as Sadr Obama repeatedly, you might conclude that Sadr means “President” (it does). However, fluency cannot be reached passively. You need someone to talk to.

8

Something sounds really off about this. I’m thinking that she must be talking about her experience at a young age. Rapace is almost exactly my age, and, as far as I can tell, she grew up mostly in Sweden. I grew up next door, in Norway, so our experiences would presumably have been similar.

If she’s anything like the typical Scandinavian, she would have been exposed to an enormous amount of American television as a kid. And in Scandinavia we mostly don’t do the dubbing thing that you’ll get in some other places, so its all in English with Scandinavian subtitles. And, unless she was living a very sheltered life, this exposure would have been unavoidable to a large extent. The idea that she, as a Swede, would have made it to adulthood without knowing any English doesn’t add up for me. That she then set about learning it from TV, late in life, and became fluent in no time flat, also doesn’t make any sense at all.

But mostly learning her English from TV, as a kid? Yes, that would be typical.

I certainly owe my proficiency in English to all the bad American TV that I watched as a child and in my early teens. I have no doubt about that. There was no conscious choice involved in my case, though, I was just something of a juvenile couch potato.

Thank you, bad American television.

As with every other way of learning a language, this will work a whole lot better for kids than for adults. By the time you get to your mid-teens, for most people, learning a language becomes a ton more difficult. That part of your brain just ossifies, while for a child, it’s still made of play-doh. Put an adult in front of a television where the programming is in a foreign language, and it probably won’t have much of a result, no matter how long they sit there. Do it with a child, and they might just turn out bilingual.

9

In the show Farscape Aeryn learns English this way!

Most of the Spanish I know was from exposure, I’d watch a movie I knew on the Spanish channel and match up the dialog.

Or just as a kid going salsa verde? Salsa means sauce, verde? Sounds like verdant…green? Oh yea the sauce is green, green sauce!

10

The average person; no, unfortunately. In my experience only a small percentage of adults (maybe 10%) are able to pick up languages by passively being exposed to them. If learning a language were that easy the industry would not be as big as it is.

11

The child won’t have the opportunity to interact in the foreign language, though, and this will probably limit their ability to speak it. I imagine it’s similar to the experience of some of my friends who are children of immigrants to the US, who grew up able to understand their parents’ native language, since they heard them speaking it all the time, but can’t really communicate in it themselves since they were raised speaking English.

12

Immigrants can be weird about language - some (rightly in my view) raise the kids bi or multi lingual. I had a friend whose son married a French girl and went to live in France. Their twins (pre school at the time) spoke both languages as fluently as any local on either side of the channel. It was amusing when they slipped from one language to the other when trying to think of a word.

In a factory where I once worked, we had a visiting Italian driver with a problem, who spoke no English. There was a guy with an Italian name who spoke English with an accent in the building so I asked him if he could translate - it turned out that he couldn’t speak any Italian. His father was a prisoner here in WW2 and married an English girl. He became a naturalised citizen and was determined that his children were English and should forget their heritage.

13

To a certain extent, this definitely works. For instance, TV stations in the Netherlands have traditionally been showing British and American TV shows in their original versions, albeit with Dutch subtitles. It has always been my theory that this contributes very much to the fact that the Dutch on average understand and speak English much better than for instance the Germans or the French do (French and German TV usually show dubbed versions). Dutch children who watch TV are thus exposed to spoken English from a very early age.

14

Not only that but, according to my Swedish coworkers, they start English in fourth grade. So she would have needed to avoid the school system…

15

Good point! I didn’t even think of that. For me, English lessons in school were always just about regurgitating what I already knew, so I mostly spent them passing notes and not really paying attention. I guess that’s why it slipped my mind. Then again, I was never the kind of student that any teacher remembers fondly anyway, in any of my classes. But, yes, even if Rapace somehow avoided being exposed to English in other ways, she would have encountered it in school. Not saying that you can’t go through school and not learn anything, I certainly pulled that off just fine with other subjects. But still, worth noting.

True, to an extent. At least the kid will probably end up with a thick accent, which will then remain at least somewhat permanent, even if they begin interacting in the language later. And also a somewhat limited conversational vocabulary. I’m not saying that they’ll be able to pass for a native. But I also don’t think that they’ll be entirely incapable of recognizable speech.

In my case, I never actually had proper conversations in English until fairly late (beyond a few interactions on holidays, which where limited by me being very shy, and in the aforementioned lessons in school, where no one was a native speaker anyway, and which in any case didn’t really add up to very much). Odd as it sounds, I was actually reading a ton of college-level material in English (with no problems) before I had real conversations in it.

Speaking it regularly took some getting used to when I first needed to do that, but I would certainly say that knowing the language in other ways gave me an absolutely enormous head start. Going from hearing it spoken a lot to speaking it wasn’t that much of a leap for my brain to make. They’re not completely separate things. Also, I was already “talking” to myself in English in my head much of the time.

I still have a very noticeable accent, which annoys me. But it’s not *that *bad. To put it this way, I mostly know what I want to say, and the rest is about my mouth not tripping me up over the phonetics.

Obviously, interacting beats watching TV by a mile. I’m not saying otherwise. I have a friend (a fellow Norwegian) who speaks English with, as far as I can tell, no noticeable accent at all. She grew up speaking English with her dad at home, as he’s American. She also spent some time in the U.S. when she was young. The difference is massive, obviously. But I do contend that knowing the language mostly from hearing it, without interacting in it (or at least not much), should still also give you at least some ability to speak it.

It does probably depend on the language, though. Norwegian isn’t that far from English phonetically, anyway. Japanese or Russian could be entirely different balls of wax, for all I know.

16

I’ll also just repeat what I said earlier: I think the TV method works somewhat for kids, but probably not so much for adults. Not for me, at least. At this point in my life, I could watch French movies all day long, and not pick up a single word of French. I know, because I’ve gone on a couple of French movie binges. And no, zero effect. Of course, as part of a concerted effort to learn French, it might do something. But just passive listening, without actively trying to learn something, in adulthood? Nope. That part of my brain seems to have shut up shop. I might as well have been watching with the sound off. Thank God for subtitles.

17

If you already have some knowledge of the language, you will probably get better by watching TV.

If you have no prior knowledge of the target language, but you are watching TV with subtitles in your own language, there is a good chance you will eventually learn to understand it.

If you are starting from zero (for example, if I were fed a non-stop diet of Thai or Fulani TV) I think you could go a very long time without understanding or learning anything useful at all. And I believe that is true for adults and children alike.

18

My favorite weatherperson, Evelyn Taft is the daughter of Russian emigres who spoke no English. She learned English by watching the weather channel.

19

Several years of schooling, when I was obliged to learn French, failed to make me anything more than a reluctant student.

That changed one summer. I have vivid memories of when I was a backpacking student sleeping on beaches in the South of France. Each evening extremely pretty French women in evening dress came for stroll. Suddenly my schoolboy French had huge relevance.

I think, perhaps, learning a foreign language is a lot easier if you are in a relationship with a native speaker.

20

That definitely helps, but it’s all relative. If you’re not good at picking up languages then it’ll be a little easier; if you have a natural affinity for learning languages it will be a little easier (but much more gratifying, which could possibly spur you along to learn even more easily). Then there are all of the shades in between.

It also goes for different languages, different alphabets, different relationships with the the native speaker/s etc. A particularly satisfying relationship with someone who you share many cultural norms and your respective languages share many commonalities will be easier. I learnt a bit of French at school, learning for around 5 years, enough to survive if was dropped in the middle of Lyon, I could translate a lot of road signs and go to a restaurant and order. I’ve picked up American/Australasian (English) slang from girlfriends instantly; it ‘just makes sense’ even if I’d never heard the term before. But Chinese or Vietnamese? Where do you start? I can’t read a word - even with very a patient girlfriend teaching me - and can barely say many words either.