About

MovieDict gets you ready for a movie in English. For every movie it gives you the phrases worth knowing before you watch. Each phrase comes with its level, its meaning in simple words, and the line where the movie says it. Read them before you press play, then listen for them.

We quote single lines from a movie, never longer passages, and we show no video or audio from the movies themselves.

Why I made it

Watching movies in their original English has never been easy for me. When I go to the cinema with friends, I sometimes get lost and only understand parts of the movie.

About ten years ago I had an idea: learn the phrases of a movie before you watch it, then try to catch them while you watch. I wanted it as one more way to work on my English, next to the usual ways of learning. I tried to make it work back then, but the technology was not there yet. So the idea stayed with me all this time, and I kept thinking how nice it would be to have a tool that makes learning from movies automatic.

Now the technology is here. With AI it's much easier to get material made for your own case, and this tool is exactly that: phrases for the one movie you are going to watch.

I made the tool for myself first, and I saw good results. Then a friend of mine saw me with a cheat sheet for a movie. He is not a native speaker either, and he said it was an amazing idea. He started to learn with me, and he told me he wanted to do it more often. That's when I understood it could be useful for more people. So I'm starting this project now, to see if it can help other people too.

I'm not a teacher. I'm a learner who made a tool for other learners. Today you can learn without a teacher, and often what you need is consistent material and a good habit of keeping the pace. I hope this tool helps you in your day-to-day learning.

Why movies

A movie shows situations you also meet in real life, so you see how a phrase is really used. A dictionary or a list of words doesn't give you that: you learn the word, but not how people use it. Lessons often have the same problem. They teach grammar, but very often not real communication, or what fits in which situation. Real speech is a little different. It has slang and emotions, and grammar can't describe them well.

Research on movies and TV says the same. People learn words from watching, and regular watching over a long time can add up to a lot. Also, the more words you already know, the more new ones you learn from watching. So it makes sense to learn the phrases of a movie before you watch it.

How a movie's level is measured

Every word spoken in a movie gets a level from two CEFR word lists. The movie's level is the lowest level at which a learner knows 95 of every 100 words. Research on movies takes this as the point where you can follow the story. At the movie's easy level a learner knows 98 of every 100 words. Both levels are approximate, because a movie is more than its words.

Speech speed is the number of words per minute while people speak. Under 140 is slow, 140 to 180 is standard, and above 180 is fast.