How a sitcom taught Korea English

RM of BTS) has told the story in interviews, including on Ellen in 2017. His mother bought the Friends box set when he was a teenager, and he watched every season three times over: first with Korean subtitles, then with English subtitles, then with none.

He is now the member who does the group's English interviews, and he addressed the United Nations in English in 2018. He was far from the only Korean teenager doing it.

The three passes are a ladder. Each one keeps the lines the same and takes away a little help. The first pass gives you the story.

The second ties every spoken line to its written words, while you still know what is going on. The third is just watching television in English.

There is a study on the middle rung. In Birulés-Muntané and Soto-Faraco (2016), sixty Spanish-speaking university students with intermediate English watched one hour of an English drama. A third had English subtitles, a third Spanish subtitles, a third none.

Only the English-subtitle group's listening comprehension improved. One hour, one episode, a small gain, and that is the point: a single evening of matching sound to text moved the needle, where the translation did not.

The mechanism is simple. Spoken English runs the words together and you cannot hear where one stops.

The subtitle shows you. Do that for enough lines and your ear starts to do it alone.

You do not need ten seasons. Take one short scene or one chapter you can understand. Go through it once with a translation, once with the text in the language beside the audio, and once with the text hidden.

If the last pass is a wall, go back a rung. This ladder is how Aloglot reads to you: the words in the language, lit as they are spoken, the English under each sentence for the first pass, and any word explained on a tap, so the middle rung is always there when you need it.

Sources

• Wikipedia. RM (musician).)
• Birulés-Muntané and Soto-Faraco (2016). Watching subtitled films can help learning foreign languages. PLoS ONE, 11(6).