I’m coming off a very successful Mont Pelerin Society meeting at Hoover that started Wednesday night and went to last night. One of my pleasures at such events is meeting new people and hearing their stories. At breakfast on Thursday, I was sitting with Robert Skidelsky, the famous biographer of Keynes (a real sweetheart, by the way–Skidelsky, not Keynes) and across from a young woman who had grown up in Romania. My friend and co-author Charley Hooper commented to her on how good her English was. She thanked him and said that she had learned it from watching cartoons. This was when she was 6, which would have made it about 1995 or 1996. She said there were no subtitles and so she had to learn English if she wanted to understand them. The cartoons, she said, were typically from Hanna-Barbera but she also watched Bugs Bunny.
Her name is Georgiana Constantin-Parke.
She told me that when she was about 6, she was watching a show on TV with her parents that had subtitles in Romanian and she was laughing at all the right parts. Her father asked her how she could follow it because she couldn’t read Romanian. She said she wasn’t reading Romanian–she was understanding what the actors were saying in English. He couldn’t believe her. So he had her turn her back to the TV and tell him what was being said. Of course, she was able to do so.
I got Georgiana’s permission to tell the story. She said, though, that this was fairly common. She had friends in Romania at the time who learned English the same way. “That makes it an even better story,” I told her.
READER COMMENTS
Gregory F Rehmke
Jan 18 2020 at 2:02pm
A friend of mine grew up in far north of Argentina, and the tv stations broadcast from Brazil. So she learned Portuguese watching cartoons.
Alan Goldhammer
Jan 18 2020 at 2:30pm
Nothing surprising about this. Many people are able to learn languages by watching television. It’s not restricted to cartoons. I know someone very well who is learning Turkish by watching Turkish soap operas on Netflix.
Dylan
Jan 19 2020 at 4:38pm
Yeah, this is definitely pretty common. I’ve got a lot of friends that migrated to the U.S. when they were in elementary school, many of them with no prior exposure to English…and I can’t think of a single one that hasn’t credited cartoons when asked how they learned the language so quickly.
One friend’s mother was Chinese and fairly strict and didn’t want her daughter to get corrupted by American TV shows, so they didn’t even own a TV…that was until another friend’s child that had moved here around the same time was speaking fluent English within just a couple of months. My friend says they went out and bought a TV right after one of their visits, and the mom never gave her a hard time about watching cartoons again.
Sam
Jan 20 2020 at 4:48am
This is common in Romania. My cousin learnt English through Cartoon Network. However, I believe they’ve started to dub the shows.
mike
Jan 22 2020 at 4:17pm
my wife’s family came to america from indonesia when she was 5. Her and her brother (2 years older) learned english mainly from sesame street. no esl programs were available in the schools they ended up attending. She has zero accent, but occasional issues with syntax.
Antony Dnes
Jan 27 2020 at 6:41pm
One might need care over exactly which cartoons; I did meet a Vietnamese lady who on arrival in the US had learnt English from romantic novels of the Harlequin type. Thus, she was prone to rhetorical exaggeration in everyday speech, “I cannot overcome my joy in our meeting and is it too much to hope you feel the same toward me?” This did fade away over time. How about Top Cat and “Hip, Hup, Hup, Hup” in the manner of Phil Silvers? I write as the scion of a family that took refuge in England after the war but retained heavy accents (“Heavy, heavy, heavy, Officer Dribble.” “That’s Dibble, TC.”) and shall claim that my “lived experience” makes it okay to note this possible choice problem.
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