How to learn Italian by watching TV shows in Italian?
Italian is the national, or de facto national, official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It has official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). It is the second most widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian, Italiano or lingua Italiana is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian is, by most measures together with Sardinian, the closest language to Latin, from which it descends via Vulgar Latin. Italian is a major European language. It is one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe.
Let’s now see how to learn Italian by watching Italian Television actively
TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken Italian; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken Italian that rarely show up in regular Italian lessons or textbooks. TV shows include some street slang, subcultural expressions, shortened words, and even some beautiful poetic lines. Television Shows include Talk Shows, Documentaries, News, Game Shows, Comedy shows, Variety Shows, Sports, Sitcoms, Dramas, Scifi, Supernatural and Fantasy Shows, Soap Operas, Historical Shows, Adventure or Action Shows, Cooking Shows, Cartoons, Reality TV, DocuDramas, Police procedural or Crime Shows.
Some if not all can certainly be a value add to your learning and offer a similar if not same benefit as the TV shows can! Don’t miss watching the news in Italian at any cost. It would be your friend for a lifetime! Choose a genre that’s simplistic to understand in the beginning, raising the bar with every lesson learnt efficiently. Remember that the Italian language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1900s to how it’s spoken today, so you may avoid learning from old shows.
Steps you could follow to get the best of your learning:
- Watch the show fully without any subtitles and record it simultaneously(if not available online to see again). Just soak up on the plot and try to grasp the “feel” of the show, what does it wish to convey. Go back to the start and re-watch it scene-by-scene: first, with no subtitles. After you’re done watching it in its entirety, watch it scene by scene to see which words you can grasp even without the help of subtitles. Every time you hear a word you’re not familiar with, write it down.
- Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles. The Italian subtitles will help you get the spelling and articles used correctly. But if you want to check if your understanding is correct, switch on the English subtitles in your 3rd viewing of that particular scene. Pay attention to the vocabulary and the context on how the words were used. Look out for any idioms and slang, and take note of the grammatical structures used in the sentences. Write down anything interesting you noticed, and be ready to review it later on.
- Listen and repeat new words. If there are some new words that you cannot seem to pronounce, listen to it and repeat the words and sentences over and over until you get the hang of it. Look up the words you don’t understand.
- If there are some things about the show that are bugging you—slang terms, regional jargons, double meanings, wordplays, and subtle humour that you couldn’t quite grasp—do some research or ask a native Italian speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
- Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.
You could watch more at Netflix Amazon Prime, IMDb
Finally,
Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian is known as the language of music because of its use in musical terminology and opera; numerous Italian words referring to music have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Its influence is also widespread in the arts and in the food and luxury goods markets.
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