Repetitive Movie Watching for Language Learning

One of my strategies for language learning is to pick a movie in each language that I’m working on and to watch it on repeat for a while until I get the phrases down. For my Spanish language film, I think I’m going with The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) (2004) because I love it and it has lots of dialogue and beautiful scenery all the way through. For my Vietnamese film, at the risk of burnout I’m also picking a favorite, The Vertical Ray of the Sun (Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng) from 2000, because it also has a lot of dialogue to focus on, as well as gorgeous, lush scenery. For my Japanese film, I’m not sure yet, my favorite Japanese movie at the moment is Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which is just the best film about appreciating moments of the everyday and living a disciplined life. But it has very little dialogue, so maybe I just need to just watch some more Japanese films and expand my options before deciding.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Vertical Ray of the Sun is by one of my favorite directors, Tran Anh Hung, and his movies play no small part in my desire to learn Vietnamese and visit the country. Here’s a scene that I really love from The Vertical Ray of the Sun where the family sings the song “Cuối cùng cho một tình yêu” (The last song for a love). From listening, I can only pick up a few words that I’ve learned so far, like “Bây giờ” (which means “now” and sounds like bay-zah), “Một” (meaning “a” or “one”), and “yêu” (love). I looked around for a good translation for this and found a few different ones with different meanings, so I can’t tell, but here’s one very helpful YT commenter’s translation, which makes most sense to me. Note that the commenter mentions that the lyrics are a poem, and it is “complicated in meaning.”