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How to Watch TV Shows WITHOUT Subtitles

Hi, I’m Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. Do you wanna watch English TV shows without subtitles? Let’s talk about it. If you want to enjoy watching English TV shows or movies without subtitles, you’re in the right place, but first, we need to address your mindset.

To watch the Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones, or even Friends without subtitles, you need to know, you will not understand every single word. Especially if right now it’s really challenging for you to understand anything in an English TV show, your goal is not to understand every word.

Your goal is to enjoy watching the show and to understand the context and the general ideas without subtitles. So in your mind, you need to let go of any frustration, “I can’t understand that phrase!”, “Oh I missed that expression.” Don’t worry about it, let it go, the main purpose here, especially starting off is to understand the context. Before we start with my method, my one tip for subtitle success, let’s find a short three to five minute YouTube video or TED Talk that is a good maybe too fast, not too slow video.

Let’s imagine you can already understand 10 words. Okay, it’s a good start, I wanna make sure you don’t start with a video where someone is talking like, it’s just so fast in your ears that it is unbelievable. Let’s start with something a little bit simpler and use this method and then you can work your way up. What’s the method?

Let’s talk about it. My number one tip for subtitle success is to first watch the video without subtitles. Here you’re testing your ears, what can you understand? What don’t you understand? Second, watch it again with subtitles in English. Here you can see each word, you can catch each word, even if you need to pause it.

Great, you are seeing each word and you’re hearing it at the same time. And then the final part, is to watch it again without subtitles. Did you hear more than the first time? Probably because now that you’ve seen those words in the English subtitles, you’re gonna be able to pick them up audibly when you are listening without subtitles.

This one tip of actually using subtitles to help you slowly get away from using subtitles is an excellent method and it’s something that I’ve used a lot as I’ve been learning French. So let’s see how you can use this in the real world with a TED Talk. Let’s go over to the TED Talk website.

Here you’ll find a lot of great speeches about interesting topics. Most of them are about 15 minutes, but I see one here that is only five minutes and 41 seconds, great. Let’s click on that. You can listen to the speaker, but the cool thing about TED Talks is that you can click on the transcript. You can choose different languages, if you would like, but I recommend starting with English.

You’re learning English, so test your English skills, and you can click on any sentence and it will take you to that exact place in the speech that used that sentence. So if you want to test your ears again and again, listen to that sentence, read the sentence, use the subtitles, don’t use the subtitles, use this method with TED Talks. Be consistent and practice understanding fast English every day.

I recommend taking this technique and challenging yourself for three days. One day one, choose a short video clip, three to five minutes and use those three different steps. Use it without subtitles, with subtitles, then without subtitles. And on day two, go and listen to a new clip and use those three steps, but when you’re finished, you back and watch the day one clip without subtitles.

You’ll be surprised that you can actually understand more and more each time that you listen, and then one day three, chose a new clip, use those three steps without subtitles, with subtitles, without subtitles, and then guess what? You’re gonna go back, go back to the day two clip, go back to the day one clip, and watch those without subtitles.

You can repeat this for as many days as you’d like, but I think three days is a good starting point, it’s a good challenge, you can do it. If you’re studying a five minute video, it should only take you 15 minutes the first day, 20 minutes the second day, and 25 minutes the third day. That’s not too bad, especially if you are focusing and really improving your listening skills.