Reader

1

In the spring of 2013, after hearing how good Friends (the TV series) is for countless times and from a great number of people, I decided to start watching it. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I have made, ever. I ended up spending the whole following year on its 10 seasons and 236 episodes, which gave me a lot of joys, and left me some greatest memories.

2

Afterwards, I spent another year on Friends, except this time, only on the first season. You read it right, I literally spent one year on just 24 episodes!

But I'm not just watching them, instead, I use Friends as a way to learn English.

Does it work? Well, I don't have any yardstick against my English ability, but after doing it, my gut feeling says I have improved a lot. Comparing this and the article I wrote two years ago, for example, now I use more clauses, conjunctions and better vocabularies.

3

This is how I do it.

1. Listen to each episode dozens of times, until I literally remember all the lines and know what they are going to say before they say it.
   
2. For the parts that I can't get when listening, I try my best to guess. If that doesn't work either, I check the transcripts.
   
3. Read the transcripts aloud.
   
4. Use Google, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary for new words, slangs, idioms, jokes (especially those from Chandler) and cultural background knowledge.
   
5. Ask questions. Here is a list of the questions I asked on Reddit:
   
   • What exactly is a "spontaneous text message"?
     
   • Why is the joke funny: "How do you fit a pope into a Volkswagen?"
     
   • What is "you get your ya-yas by taking money from all of your friends"?
     
   • Why people say "What do you got?" instead of "What do you get"?
     
   • Why does Phoebe (in Friends) say "Boy scouts could have camped under there"?
     

4

The most important thing is keep doing it.

5

Some friends know what I'm doing and they recommend some other TV shows, like Community, Seinfeld, and The Big Bang Theory. I tried most of them. For example, I watched the first few episodes of Community without subtitles. But frankly, I found they are simply too hard for me. To myself, and probably most (if not all) of the English learners I personally know, learning trendy vocabularies from the latest TV shows is not the priority, learning daily conversational English to improve fluency is. That's why I like Friends.

6

It took me some time to decide if I should write this in English or Chinese.

I thought about Chinese in the beginning, as I write this to share my experience, and using Chinese, the language I and most of my blog readers speak, would clearly make my sharing clear and specific.

But then I figured, at the end of the day, it's about learning English, and there is no better way to improve than using it as much as possible. And more importantly, the way I use is mostly for intermediate or advanced English speakers, who'd get it anyway. So, English it is.

7

I'll be there for you.