Watching foreign-language TV during the coronavirus pandemic can help you learn a new language

With university classrooms and language schools closed because of the pandemic, language students must find new ways to practise and improve. In recent years, an increasing number of applied linguists have been advocating regular TV viewing to learn English.

Research shows that students are motivated to learn language through watching foreign language television programs. In the world of professional sports, baseball players, ice-hockey players and football managers have also claimed that television was a key resource for their language development. 

Surprisingly, television has played a relatively small role in the language learning classroom. Our research has shown that students learn new words and phrases through watching television, and the amount of learning may be similar to what is learned through reading.

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How to Learn a New Language at Home, According to Language Experts

By Kayla Levy

If you’ve watched all of Netflix, played every board game in your possession, and baked more bread than you can possibly consume, consider spending some of your newfound free time learning (or relearning) a language. The prospect of finally mastering, say, French, guarantees hours of indoor entertainment during our seemingly never-ending imperative to stay indoors, but experts say the first step in successful language learning is to consider your motivations. “People’s goals for learning another language can vary from something serious, like they need to move and function in another society, to the other extreme, of downloading a phone app and learning a new language just for fun,” says Dr. Julio Torres, assistant professor of applied linguistics at University of California, Irvine, who explains that pedagogical methods differ based on learning goals. Another thing to keep in mind are your “internal factors,” like learning style and interests, because “we tend to emotionally respond to something when it’s meaningful to us personally,” says Dr. Laura Baecher of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Hunter College’s School of Education.

With everything from yoga classes to lectures currently taking place online (often for free), this is a unique moment to learn another language with the help of technology. “Language learning has always happened outside the framework of official learning online, but now you can easily find Zoom calls in other languages to participate in,” says Dr. Sandy Fox, postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University and founder and producer of Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish. “It’s a very special time for practicing language.”

So, whether you want to converse with your neighbor, or need to practice grammar for a distance-learning exam, we spoke with six language experts — including a director at the Middlebury Language Schools and a polyglot — to find the best programs and resources for your at-home language learning.

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This is The Hardest Language In The World

This video is all about Jamaican Patois, aka Jamaican Creole, the English-based creole language of Jamaica.

On this episode of "Slang School," Kumail Nanjiani and Natalie Morales teach Miami Spanish and Urdu slang. The stars put their heads together to come up with some of the slang words they know best.

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Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero