London Language vs. American Ears: Why watching movies to learn a foreign language is a good idea.

We are about to leave London and I have been reflecting on the interesting aspects of British vs. American English. We all know there are many dialects and accents in any language. I've especially been thinking about this as a student of French.

If you've read my blog you know that I watch a lot of French language movies (when I'm home) to improve my French. What I may not have mentioned is that I also have to make a point of watching or listening to British English so that I can keep up on it as well. This week has proven the point as I have to ask everyone to repeat themselves before I figure out what they are saying. (And sometimes they ask me to repeat myself.) My impediment is with the different sounds of English, not the vocabulary.

So, I know that a really good way for me to improve my French comprehension is to continue to watch movies and videos, listen to native speakers, and even listen to French radio. However, what mostly benefits me doing these things is not the acquisition of more vocabulary but instead the rhythms and inflections. When I now watch movies in French I am hearing so much more... because I know what to listen for... the pronouns, key phrases, homonyms (very difficult and sometimes funny), and probably a lot more than I'm not really aware of.

It occurred to me that understanding Londoners is often difficult in that so many are speaking English as a second language. This is also true in French in France. In English it's usually easy to know that this is a problem for me, but in London the various local accents added to the first language becomes rather challenging. Enunciation on both listener and speaker's parts normally solves the problem. But when trying  to speak another language such as French, when you don't know it very well yet, you have to assume that you just don't understand the French when the problem may be another unfamiliar accent or dialect distorting your understanding of the language.

On my last day here we have done:
2 museums: The British Museum (again) and The Tate Museum of Modern Art
3 restaurants
1 boat ride on the Thames
2 walks: the Millennium Bridge crossing the Thames and the Whitehall area along the river up to Big Ben
Endless travel on the underground system, without which I would not have been able to do any of this. A big thanks to the railroad systems even if it seems like half of it was shut down this week end... we discovered commuter shuttles on the Thames.