Name: Why you can't understand English movies.
Uploaded: 2025-06-27T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 7 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

If you find English movies difficult to understand, you're not alone.

And it's not because your English is bad.

It's just because you have to train your ears differently.

In today's video, I'm going to teach you why you can't understand English movies and how you can work on fixing that so in future you'll be able to watch American, British, Canadian, Australian movies, whatever you want, and you'll be able to understand native speakers.

So with that, let's get into today's video.

Now if you can't understand English movies, here's why.

You see, when we speak quickly, we combine words together.

And if you're not familiar with connected speech, you'll find it difficult to understand fast spoken English.

So the first step to understanding fast spoken English is to realize that connected speech is the reason you can't understand native speakers.

It's because what you learned in school, what you learned in the textbook, is not actually how native speakers speak in real life.

So start identifying these connected speech patterns.

If you want to learn more about this, you can check out my Conversation Confidence course.

There are several lessons on connected speech in that course.

One of the ways you can actually learn connected speech is by watching movies with subtitles.

You see, if you can see the words on the screen and you can hear them being spoken at the same time, this is going to retrain your brain to connect the way the words sound with the way the words are written.

If you want to improve your English by watching movies and using the subtitles, there are four levels.

The first level is where you listen to the audio in your native language and you put on the English subtitles.

The second level is where you listen to the audio in English and you put on subtitles in your native language.

The third level is where you listen to the audio in English and you put subtitles on in English.

And of course, the fourth and the most difficult level is where you listen to the audio in English, without subtitles.

Here's the thing, even if you're not at level 3 or level 4 yet, that's okay.

So even if you need to turn on the subtitles in your native language or in English, that's perfectly okay.

There's nothing wrong with that and it can actually be a really good way of working your way up and building the confidence you need until you can finally get to level 4.

Now when it comes to subtitles, you have to be careful.

Because watching movies with subtitles might be making your English worse.

But you don't want to become reliant on them.

And they're there so you can eventually understand spoken English without having to use them.

There are no subtitles in real-world conversation.

You should use subtitles if you're at the level where you can't understand a movie without them.

But your goal should always be to eventually stop using them and get to the point where you can understand spoken English without subtitles.

In English, we say you have to learn to walk before you can run.

Something my students tell me all the time in the club is that they're listening to a movie, they're listening to a conversation, and they get stuck.

Here's why you get stuck in conversation.

You're listening for individual words and not the general meaning.

But a big part of the problem is that your vocabulary is not big enough.

So what happens is you're listening to a native speaker.

You hear a word you don't understand, you stop, and you try to figure out what that word was, but the conversation is already 10 steps ahead.

You feel like you can't keep up, when in reality, the problem is that your vocabulary isn't big enough.

It's not necessarily that you have problems understanding what they're saying, it's that you don't have the vocabulary yet.

So that's why expanding your vocabulary and making that a priority can really help you so you don't get stuck as much in conversation or when watching movies.

Now a question I get all the time, what are the best movies to learn English?

And honestly, you're not going to like this answer.

One movie is not better than another for learning English.

You need to watch a movie you'll actually enjoy.

Because if you don't enjoy the movie, if you're not paying attention to it, if you're bored, you won't be engaged, you won't be focused, and you won't improve your English.

So turn on Netflix, go to a genre or category you enjoy, whether that's romance, history, action, suspense, and find a movie you'd actually watch in your native language.

For example, I personally am not a huge fan of science fiction movies, so I probably wouldn't find them that useful to learn a language with, but other students would.

It's the same with books or podcasts or news articles.

You should do exactly what you would do in your native language, but in English.

Because learning a language is not necessarily about doing things you don't find interesting.

It's about doing the things that you already do, but doing them in English, doing them in the target language.

So whatever type of movie you enjoy, that's good enough.

And remember what I said earlier about subtitles.

There's nothing wrong with using subtitles.

It doesn't matter where you are right now, whether you're still at the bottom or you can already understand movies pretty well.

Eventually, you will get there, and eventually, it will be a lot easier to understand native English speakers.

If you did, make sure to leave a like, let me know in the comments, and subscribe to English at the Ready here on YouTube so you don't miss any future lessons.

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Why you can't understand English movies.

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eventually

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