Should you look up words and use subtitles when you watch TV to learn a language?

I spoke with Jeremiah, from Jeremiah Language Ideas, about language input and watching TV shows and content. There's a lot of controversy around it, so I asked him a few questions directly and shared my own thoughts too.

Does looking up words help?

I asked Jeremiah whether looking up words you don't know while watching TV shows and movies helps. He said yes, in general, based on his experience. He mainly studied Vietnamese, for almost three and a half years now, and he's just moved to Vietnam. When he first started he knew nothing about language learning and thought he could be fluent in one or two months. Most of his time has been on YouTube, learning from native content, so he's had experience both looking up words and just immersing without lookups.

He said it depends on your state of mind, which he thinks isn't discussed enough:

• Early morning, coffee, ready for a challenge: looking up words, as long as it's controlled and not 30 words a minute, has a lot of benefit. When you're just watching, your brain searches for meaning and can drown out smaller words you don't understand. Lookups stop things going over your head, and we've all looked up a word and heard it the next day without needing to look it up.
• After work: never a good time for intensive study. Turn your brain off, watch something and enjoy it for its own sake. Getting out of the learner mindset and into an enjoyer or user mindset is very important too.

What resonated with me was the mindset. Say I'm watching Netflix with my partner and she pauses it to get a drink. That annoys me, because I have to rewind ten seconds and remember what happened. If pausing stops you being emotionally engaged, "what's going to happen?", don't pause it to look at words. If I've got half an hour after work and I can't be bothered because I have to keep pausing and looking up, I get a notification on my phone and I'm distracted. That's a risk. So if you don't have the mental capacity, just enjoy what you're watching. If you don't understand a word, it'll appear again as you watch more, and your brain makes connections. "I can see a water bottle, I can see a lake, oh, that must mean water."

Jeremiah had experienced that problem himself. In Vietnamese he stopped getting immersion at one point because he looked up every single word. Some days he'd think, "I'm just going to watch English today, I can't be bothered."

What worked for him in Japanese

With Japanese he built a routine:

• In the morning, grind hard. If a sentence had one unknown word, he'd look it up. If it had more than one, he'd ignore it and tolerate it. At first he ignored a lot of sentences, but eventually he understood many of them.
• Look up out of curiosity. "What did he say to her? Why did he say that? Wait, I want to know." It was based on the content, not a language learning reason, so it became less of a chore and more of an investigation. It turns a romantic comedy into a mystery.
• After work, no flashcards and no lookups. He'd watch anime on a service with Japanese audio and no Japanese subtitles, turning his brain off.

He says the main benefit of that isn't even vocabulary, it's your skill of listening. In Vietnam he talked to his barber for an hour while he cut his hair. If he hadn't developed the ability to listen to Vietnamese for an hour straight, how would he have had that conversation? He couldn't pause his barber and say, "Let me look up your word in my flashcard system."

Subtitles

Subtitles in the target language. If your dream scenario for the language doesn't involve reading, there's very little benefit, outside of maybe making it a bit easier to look up words. He said you can develop an ear within a couple of months to type words into a dictionary. For Japanese, where he wants to read manga, there is a benefit. But for oral communication there might be more harm than good. He developed subtitle dependency, to where he couldn't understand without them, and that becomes a vicious cycle because it feels bad to take them off.

English subtitles. He thinks people are too quick to say never use them. His use case is if you're a beginner, or in a phase where language learning isn't your main priority. He'd spent months hardcore studying Japanese, then took a break to focus on his YouTube channel and a full-time job. At the end of a long day he just wanted to understand everything, so he watched Japanese with English subtitles. It was that or straight English. He'd much rather see someone watch target language content with English subtitles than take a break, because the more time you spend with the language, the better, and it stopped what he'd learned decaying.

My view is that any exposure counts. If you can't be bothered doing anything, even five minutes on an app while you queue matters. The point of TV shows is to get you as close as possible to immersion, and the best way to be immersed is to live in the country. If you can't, you're living in Manchester and you watch a show, and to stay engaged, use subtitles if you don't understand what's going on.

• At A1 or A2, use English subtitles.
• If you're intermediate, use target language subtitles if you've got the mental space.
• If you're tempted to put it off, don't. Do ten minutes with English subtitles, because that lowers the friction, and you'll most likely do more than ten minutes anyway.

Jeremiah agreed, with a limit. Have some time without subtitles and some with, or you end up in the dependency zone. One trick he suggested: rewatch something you've already seen in English, with the target language dub. He watched Naruto in Japanese with English subtitles in high school, and it was long enough ago that it's not boring, but he already knows the plot, so there's no ambiguity to worry about. If you don't have a 500-episode show, find a YouTuber playing a game you've already played. Even if you understand nothing of the commentary, watching the game is entertaining, and the commentary is a bonus.

TV shows or movies?

Jeremiah prefers TV shows because they're longer running, and one of his biggest recommendations is to get as much natural repetition as possible. The story takes place in a certain area, so there's a lot of the same vocabulary. He learned navy, pirate, ship and intruder really quickly from One Piece because they said it every episode. TV also helps with proper nouns. As a beginner it's hard to tell whether someone's saying a name or a word you don't know, but by episode five of a 20-episode show you know the main characters' names.

I agree. The end of one episode leads into the next, so it doesn't feel like homework. It's like me and my girlfriend watching The Rookie. We could binge it for ages. Pair that with language learning and that's the perfect thing. The main thing is whatever makes you more engaged and want to come back.

Input or output, and what to work on

I asked what the balance should be between watching content and speaking. Jeremiah said to stop, get a notebook and deeply think about your current abilities, as unbiased as possible. It can hurt your feelings, but it's important. Then rank four skills from best to worst:

1. Listening. Not just vocabulary: could you follow someone speaking at native speed using only words you know?
2. Vocabulary. How many words you actually know.
3. Accent.
4. Fluency. How well you can use those words, speak at a decent speed and remember what you know.

Whichever is your weakest, work on that, and do the exercise again a month later. A lot of beginners are limited by vocabulary or accent, which are input-heavy. His advice for a very beginner is to turn your brain off and go for accent and the most common 1,000 to 2,000 words. But as an intermediate it could be any of the four. He's met people with 5,000 words who can't hear them or can't speak them. His own weak spot in Vietnamese is fluency: he asked the parking attendant in a very long, English-translated way whether he had to pay to park, when in Vietnamese it's very short.

I like that framework. It's not a fixed 90% input and 10% output. It's assessing yourself regularly and attacking your weakest link.