How To Understand Spanish TV Without Subtitles: The Ultimate Hack

What Alex wants to do is a relatively advanced task: understand Spanish TV.

Fortunately, Spring Spanish teacher Maura has several tips that can help you and Alex navigate this exercise.

1. How to start to understand Spanish TV

Disclaimer: keep in mind that this lesson is intended for students with at least an intermediate level of Spanish. Listening to and understanding television content is a rather complex task. Therefore, it’s not something you need to face when you’re just starting to study Spanish.

Now, the first step is to increase the amount of content you consume in Spanish.

The key is exposure, exposure, and more exposure. But you can’t start with the most difficult. In this case, television.

Start by consuming a lot of content in Spanish on:

• Redes sociales como Instagram o TikTok. (Social networks like Instagram or TikTok.)
• Podcasts cortos sobre temas que domines. (Short podcasts on topics you’re familiar with.)
• Videos de YouTube: especialmente aquellos hechos para nativos, porque incluirán formas más parecidas a las que verás en la tele. (YouTube videos: especially those made for natives, because they will include forms more similar to what you’ll see on TV.)

At the end of the lesson, we’ll play with a dialogue and subtitles so you can practice what we’ll discuss.

2. General advice to understand Spanish TV

María Fernanda made a video on our Spring Spanish YouTube channel about how to learn Spanish by watching TV that you can check out here.

The tips you’ll learn from her work perfectly with the advice in this video.

MAURA
Es importante que tengas una estrategia a la hora de exponerte a todo ese material en español.
[It is important that you have a strategy when it comes to exposing yourself to all this material in Spanish.]

ALEX
Claro, sé que tengo que escuchar con mucha atención y de forma consciente.
[Of course, I know I have to listen very carefully and consciously.]

MAURA
Eso. También es útil que escojas bien los temas, no trates de entender cada palabra, y tengas mucha paciencia.
[That. It is also helpful if you choose your topics well, don’t try to understand every word, and have a lot of patience.]

Certain strategies can help you approach this exercise in an analytical and organized way. To do this, keep in mind:

• Don’t focus on every word: what matters is the sense of what you hear, the topic, and the context. The faster you learn to trust this, the faster you’ll progress in your understanding.
• Listen first in your native language: this way you’ll have the general idea. This way, you can rely on what you already know when you process it again in Spanish.
• Choose long-running series: each series is its own universe of expressions, themes, and contexts that repeat over and over. The more you know the series itself, the easier it will be to detect which chunks are repeated.
• Turn up the volume: don’t be surprised if you need more volume to understand Spanish. It’s normal with any new language we’re learning.
• Be patient: as I told Alex, it’s very important that you have a lot of patience. Understanding TV without subtitles is particularly demanding. Sometimes it’s difficult even for natives!]

3. How to play with subtitles for best results

I think it’s important for you to know that the tendency to use subtitles is on the ris.

Even for native speakers. We recently came across a video that explained just this. It said that thanks to technology, audio recording and actor interpretation had changed a lot. One of the consequences of this is, curiously, the increased use of subtitles.

Here are several ways to use subtitles when doing the exercise of watching TV in Spanish:

• Put the subtitles in your native language: in this case, try not to read the subtitles unless you get completely lost.
• Put the subtitles in Spanish: of course, putting Spanish subtitles with Spanish audio is an excellent idea. The audio reinforces what you read and what you read reinforces what you hear. Here we encourage you to read the subtitles as much as you want. Little by little you will start to read them less and less.
• Understand the content with subtitles and repeat it without subtitles: the first time you can use subtitles in your native language, then you can put them in Spanish and finally watch the content without any subtitles.

Think of subtitles as training wheels on a bike. It’s not cheating. It’s about gaining confidence and strength progressively and safely.

4. Practice to understand Spanish TV

Let’s put all this to the test in a small exercise.

First you will see the dialogue with English subtitles, then with Spanish subtitles, and finally without subtitles. However, the dialogue is in native Spanish, both in expressions and speed.

Ready? Go watch the video and practice to understand Spanish TV!

Here’s a little help, a transcript of the conversation:

What did you think?

This exercise is something you can reproduce and adapt as you prefer.

We hope you now feel encouraged to dive into the challenging exercise of watching TV in Spanish.