Increasing Vocabulary: Reading A Newspaper or Watching English Movies with English Subtitles?


Hi there!🌞

Welcome back to my blog.

So, on this occasion, I would like to talk about ‘Increasing Vocabulary’. Hm, what a heavy topic, isn’t it?😅 (if we compare it to skincare topic).

If you search 'how to increase English vocabulary' on Google, it will show you a bunch of tips and tricks from many websites. But, the dominant tips for 'how to increase English vocabulary' is READING. Am I wrong? You can just googled it, by the way.

So, I was trying to follow those tips a few months ago. A couple of mornings ago, I read the Jakarta Post. When I didn't have an idea of what the words meant, I figured out in my vocabulary and wrote it to a special book.

But as an ordinary youngster (who always feels bored with reality condition, I'm just kidding, no offense hehe), I was bored with all kinds of news. So I decided to read a novel. Well, actually an English novel. The real 'English Language' novel (Picture 1). I hope you catch what I mean.


Picture 1. My 'Real' English Novel


I usually enjoy in reading novels, but I didn't know why... I even couldn't finish a sheet of this novel for a whole day. I think this situation is because of my minimum vocabulary, so I can't understand the story well😔.

Thus, I despaired for a couple of days. I didn't want to read whatever English things anymore for a while until I got my own way for 'how to increase English vocabulary'. It called, WATCHING ENGLISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLE. I already do this way for a couple of weeks. I also noted down any new words that I encounter while I was reading the subtitles on my TV screen (Picture 2).



Picture 2. My Useful Words from Newspaper or Movies
(Pls ignored my handwriting😭)


So, which one is better?

Reading a newspaper or watching serial with English subtitles?

Definitely, both of those two ways have different excesses.

Reading a newspaper will give you a lot of formal vocabulary that may be really useful for your career. Obviously, the newspaper offers minimum neglect of grammar errors. Subconsciously, it keeps your eyes on the good structure of sentences which is good for your English. Besides, you also have some updates about what happened in our economy, politic, or whatever occurring around the world. However, ONLY reading the newspaper and find out the difficult words don’t amend your pronunciation. You need to listen to how the word spoke.

In contrast with the newspaper, watching some English movies with English subtitle makes you gain a lot of informal vocabularies. Different from newspapers, English movies are commonly using spoken daily (picture 3) language which is we can listen to how they pronounce it, though movies don’t put some effort into grammar. Ordinary everyday English tends to use the same words over and over, so you have to watch quite a few films in order to gain significant vocabulary. Trust me, you can't have an educated vocabulary after watching those movies though you can learn all cursing and swearing words which is no good if you want to speak standard English haha😂.  


Picture 3. My Useful Dialogs from Movies


Although reading a newspaper and watching English movie with English subtitle might give you some new vocabularies, I recommend you to combine both ways. So, they will enrich your formal and informal vocabulary.

That’s all. See you!

Big Hug,

Ica🖤

Comments

  1. blog kitaNovember 19, 2019 at 7:51 AM

    Nice topic. I think so. Reading and watching are good ways to increase our vocabulary. ��

    ReplyDelete
  2. Syarifah SalsabilaNovember 19, 2019 at 8:22 AM

    I like to watch. Because it's more simple for me (as a person who easy to forget something:"). If I watch english movies with eng sub and I don't know the meaning of the vocabularies. Well, I can see the expressions or the situations....But read an eng book??? Ummm nahhhhh

    ReplyDelete

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