Filip Brož Nowadays, it is literally an obligation to know a second foreign language. In the vast majority of cases it is English. Perhaps every person has encountered English at some point, but I myself know many chronic beginners who, although they know the basics, never really communicate or understand. These people are motivated, but after a while it always gets over them and the initial enthusiasm wears off. What can you do?
In my opinion, there are definitely several ways. The first and probably the most logical is to travel abroad and live there for a while. However, if you want to stay at home, you have no choice but to do some self-study or a language school. However, there is a third alternative path that makes a lot of sense to me personally if you don't want to attend any tutoring and you are using an iPad. We are talking about the handy application Movies for iPad from Archimedes Inspiration and their language schools Stories.
It may seem like nonsense to some, but you can improve your English (or any other language) very well by watching movies and series in the original version. In a language school Stories believes in teaching in context, through stories, and the Movies for iPad app is the result of many years of experience teaching foreign languages. So it's not just about movies with ordinary subtitles, but an effort to learn a foreign language based on well-known, in this case even filmed stories that many of us know very well.
The Movies for iPad app is free to download for iPads in the App Store, but you'll have to pay for each of the ten feature films or eighteen National Geographic documentaries. One image costs about 18 euros (just under 500 crowns), which sounds like a lot of money, but perhaps no quality educational application was free, so read on to decide whether such an investment is worth it to you and will make sense in the final reckoning .
The menu includes hits such as Pulp Fiction, The Wolf of Wall Street, Expendables 2 or the vampire saga Twilight. In addition to the film itself, you will also get complete educational material, including an interactive Czech-English scenario, the possibility of creating educational flashcards and dozens of practical exercises.
You can work with the film in several ways, each of which is divided into several lessons. You can play the movie in full screen in the original version and just watch. You can also split the screen into two parts - the upper one will run the movie and the lower one will display an interactive English-Czech script, which includes English subtitles and a Czech translation. As a third option, you can watch only the scenario without video with sound in full screen mode.
In addition, you can save all dialogues in learning cards, which you can return to at any time. Thanks to the cards, you can easily repeat phrases that you didn't understand, for example, or that you liked and want to improve. You can have each phrase played and the Czech translation displayed.
Once you have reached the end of the lesson, Movies for iPad will offer you to continue with the movie, or to test your knowledge in interactive exercises, which of course focus on how well you understood the given part of the movie. There are sentence completions, dictations, and translations to practice grammar and vocabulary.
The mentioned 18 euros only cost popular feature films. In addition, you can play a short demo with them first, so that you know what you are getting into. However, shorter documentaries from National Geographic are much cheaper, they cost around 30 crowns and one is completely free. You can also download a free guide on how to study and work with films.
Plus, Movies for iPad isn't just about English. You will find pictures in Spanish and French and even two in Czech. It should be taken into account that each movie takes up about two gigabytes on the iPad, but it is not a problem to delete it at any time and download it again for free later.
After a few days of testing, I have to say that the Movies for iPad app makes sense to me personally, mainly because I enjoyed learning this way. Not everyone may be comfortable with such a teaching method, but if you are a fan of movies and need to improve yourself in this way, Movies for iPad is definitely an interesting alternative. In the future, iPhone support should also come, so you will be able to practice a foreign language in even more places.
[app url=https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/movies-for-ipad/id827925361?mt=8]
