During my travels, I’ve met countless non-native English speakers whose grasp of the language–including slang and colloquial words and phrases–is truly amazing. Many of them were lucky enough to live in a country whose national curriculum includes a strong foreign language training courses. Others, however, never completed more than a couple of basic English classes. So where did they learn such great English? The answer is pretty consistent: music and movies/TV.

Now, my guess is that for most of these people, the ratio was about 75% movies and 25% music. (The latter just sounds cooler.)

In any case, in both formal and informal learning systems, videos can help students grasp a foreign language in a way that purely visual or audio learning systems cannot. It makes sense–in the real world, most students receive both audio and visual clues to aid them. Why should their learning environment be any different?

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