How to learn Spanish by watching TV shows in Spanish?

Spanish is a Romance language with about 500 million native speakers specifically in Spain and America. The language originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.  It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the African Union and many other international organizations. Despite its large number of speakers, Spanish does not feature prominently in scientific writing and technology, though it is better represented in the humanities and social sciences. Spanish is the third most used language on internet websites after English and Russian. Spanish is a descendant of Latin and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek.

TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken Spanish; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken Spanish that rarely show up in regular Spanish 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 movies can! Don’t miss watching News in Spanish 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 Spanish language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1960s and 70s 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: 

1. 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.
2. Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles. The Spanish 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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 Spanish speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
5. Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.

Watch The Red Band Society, The Boarding School, The Boat, The Boarding School and more. 

You could watch more at BestTVSeries, Netflix, Prime Video, IMDb

Spanish vocabulary has also been influenced by Arabic, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula, with around 8% of its vocabulary having Arabic lexical roots. It has also been influenced by Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, Visigothic, and other neighbouring Ibero-Romance languages. Additionally, it has absorbed vocabulary from other languages, particularly other Romance languages such as French, Italian, Mozarabic, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, and Sardinian, as well as from Quechua, Nahuatl, and other indigenous languages of America. Modern Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire beginning in 1492, most notably to America, as well as territories in Africa and the Philippines.

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