You mean the devil won't show up? (ninth-gate-devil.wav 12KB)

You can improve your target language while watching a movie in another language using leisure time with no additional effort.

For example, you decide to spend the afternoon watching The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski. This movie was shot in English, so you select English sound but turn on the French subtitles. You will follow the story in English with your ears, but your eyes will read the subtitles in French. This does not sound like the most straightforward way of doing, but believe me, it will increase your vocabulary quite fast and with minimal effort. Words that you know passively but would not be able to use suddendly become part of your active vocabulary. Looking at subtitles, you see useful words popping up again and again. The more you watch the movie, the more words you learn.

For instance, in The Ninth Gate, publisher Boris Balkan suspects one of his antique satanist books, supposedly written by Satan himself, might be a fake. Johnnie Depp, an antique book dealers, inspects the book which looks authentic and asks Balkan 'You mean the devil won't show up?' (ninth-gate-devil.wav 12KB). On your screen you'll see the French subtitles below as 'Vous voulez dire que le Diable n’apparaît pas?'. One line in this movie is all it takes for you to learn French for devil – Diable.

Of course the short exposition to new vocabulary means you will not remember all of the interesting words at once, but you are certain to remember some at the end of the movie. One reason is that they will be associated with a scene, an image, an atmosphere, and thus be tied to something better anchored in your memory than merely reading the letters d-i-a-b-l-e.

This type of exercise if not as intensive as watching a movie in your target language, but if you like watching movies on DVD anyway, it's a great opportunity to practice and see the language used in context with no effort. I do it myself almost every day.