The TV Method

I’ve become an avid reader of Keith’s Voice on Extreme Language Learning over the past few weeks. In the past he was writing about learning languages (in his case Japanese and Manadrin Chinese) in a natural way (mostly immersion), but lately he has been focusing on something that he calls the TV Method. The principle of his method is really simple: watch television in your target language, without looking up words and without using subtitles (not even in your target language). The more you watch, the more things will make sense and the more you’ll understand, just like a baby learns his mothertongue. In the linguistics field this is called Natural Language Acquisition, or as people call it; Painless Learning. Yes, it’s really THAT simple, and if I believe him (which I do), he has gone from zero understanding of Mandarin Chinese to a whooping 25% (more or less) in 500 hours! 25% doesn’t look like a lot, but it’s more than some people reach in years of Spanish language instruction in high school and college, and Chinese is a so-called “hard language”.

Now that I’ve read more and more about this method, I realize I’ve done this mostly with Spanish as well. I never used subtitles, but did look up words and added everything to my SRS. Just until recently I’d look up A LOT, taking out the fun of getting Spanish input. But not anymore; since a few weeks I’m not looking up anything (this already wasn’t much, because I have a huge Spanish vocabulary as we speak) when watching television. I’m just watching and listening and not worrying too much about new words I see or words and expression I’ve heard in the past but don’t really get at this moment. It’s the ultimate relax mode as I’ll have about four months off from college as well.

That’s why I’ve come up with the following plan for myself: the next three months I’ll be having a time off, only doing some volunteering in Spain (not that much, just 15 hours per week) and preparing myself for a new year of college (my third year, in which I’ll attend a Spanish university). And although I have (Spanish) friends to give some attention to, I’ll still have a huge chunk of time left each and every day. So that’s why I’ll watch at least 500 hours Spanish television in the next three months. That means that I’ll have to watch about 5.5 hours of Spanish television (without subtitles and without looking up words) each and every day. More could be done easily, but I don’t want to set the bar too high, and I already reached an advanced level of Spanish. The reason why I’m doing this is that I want to see the effect on an advanced learner, because I know this method works really well for beginners.

I’ll start off easy. First I’m going to watch Lost dubbed into Spanish. I love the show in English and watched everything until season 3 (after that I started doing Spanish pretty much all the time, which meant saying goodbye to English language fun). I’m currently well into the first season, and I’m loving it all over again. After that I’ll have to see. I’m not afraid to mix things; an episode of Los Serrano or Prison Break once in a while is fine, as long as I’m getting Spanish input. After all this rather “easy” material I’ll throw in some Dawson’s Creek for over-analyzing and complex words using teens. As you see it’s all dubbed stuff, but that’s mainly because that’s what I have at the moment and because I already watched most Spanish shows I really like. I don’t care that much it’s not originally in Spanish, it’s still aimed at native speakers of Spanish.

Now, you may be wondering where reading and and SRS’ing is in all this. Although it’s not part of the TV Method, I’ll still be all doing that. No, I won’t add sentences from watching tv, but I will copy sentences from books and websites. The main reason why I’ll continue with this is because I’ve been doing it for over a year now (and therefore being normal to me) and because I’m already an advanced learner. Even Keith (and other followers of this method) agree that after a certain amount of input the learner should mix the input from watching tv with things like reading and practicing, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do (or better said: will continue to do).

I’ll also add an extra category to this blog (TV Method), where I’ll report my progress. Furthermore I’m adding a new page where I’ll track my progress in terms of time spent on what show, etc.

Wish me luck!