Lingus TV: Learn Spanish by Sitcom

Lingus TV: Learn by Sitcom.

A long time ago- in another life where I had more hair but less life experience- I sat in a GCSE French class with my fellow students. Rain lashed against the windows and billowing clouds had turned the once placid sky a twisting, cavorting sea of black. The TV set was wheeled into the classroom and we offered gasps in place of applause. This was long before the days of DVD players and portable media devices. For us, entertainment arrived in the form of a large wooden box with a screen and a video recorder that could well have been the original Betamax prototype. The pupils were ecstatic. We were going to watch a video.

And yet, we remained cautious. We’d raised our hopes before at the arrival of the TV, only to be shown “Uncle Buck” or “Cool Runnings” for the fifteen time as the school staff betrayed the fact that they’d run out of money in the video store and been to shy to ask for a bit extra from the budget to get us a decent film to watch.

Horror of all horrors: we were going to watch something “educational”. A French sitcom. The idea was simple: we’d laugh at the well-scripted comedy on the screen and pick up basic French words and phrases in the process. Well…that was the idea, anyway. What we got was somewhat different. A “British” character in the sitcom we watched struggled to speak French beyond “Un café” and seven teenagers who thought they were a lot cooler than they actually were drove round and round their local town on scooters (and I’m not talking about the motorised kind. I’m talking about the kind you have to move by foot power). To cap it all off they had incredibly dodgy hairstyles. Needless to say, we learned very little French.

Joking and bad French sitcoms aside, the idea is sound. Learning through laughter is one of the best ways to learn and all you need to make it work is some reasonably good actors, a good script and a way of making the sitcom available for people to enjoy on the move. Well, I believe I’ve found the answer.

i-Pod users can now watch Lingus TV on the move and the episodes of the sitcom are also viewable online. Check it out and discover how you can learn through laughter.