Can You Really Learn English by Scrolling?

If you follow a few English-speaking creators on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, you’ve probably picked up a phrase or two without trying. Some language apps have noticed, and now serve their lessons as short videos in a feed that looks just like social media.

So does all that scrolling count as learning? Partly. It depends on what you do while you watch.

Why scrolling can help

Stephen Krashen argued that we pick up a language by understanding what we hear and read, especially when it stretches us a little beyond our current level. Short videos are good at this.

Say you’re watching someone talk about their weekend, and they say, “We ended up staying home.” Maybe you’ve never come across ended up, but the story around it gives you a pretty good idea of what it means. A phrase learnt like that tends to stick better than one memorised from a list.

You also hear English the way people really speak it, with different accents, jokes, little fillers like um and you know, and sentences that change direction halfway through. Textbook dialogues rarely sound like that.

Research backs this up. Elke Peters and Stuart Webb found that learners picked up new words just from watching TV in a second language, and words that came up more often were more likely to stick. Studies on captioned video point the same way, with English subtitles helping both listening and vocabulary.

Where scrolling falls short

A feed moves fast. You catch a useful phrase, you understand it, and your thumb has already moved on. A few seconds later you’re watching a cat fall off a sofa.

Richard Schmidt, who studied how people learn languages, argued that we need to notice new language before we can learn much from it. Scrolling doesn’t leave a lot of room for noticing.

The level is random too. One video is so easy you learn nothing new, and the next is full of slang at double speed. The algorithm isn’t your teacher either. It shows you what keeps you watching, which isn’t always the English you need.

Then there’s the bigger gap. You might hear “I’m not really into that” and understand it straight away, but would you remember it tomorrow, mid-conversation, and use it without thinking? Watching mostly trains you to understand. Speaking needs its own practice.

Turning scrolling into learning

You don’t have to give up short videos. A few small changes go a long way.

• Choose who you follow. Pick a handful of creators you can mostly understand without translating in your head.

• Switch on English subtitles. If you need Indonesian ones to follow almost everything, that content is probably a bit too hard for now.

• Watch good videos twice. Save the useful ones and come back later. Second time round, you’ll catch things you missed.

• Keep one or two phrases, then play with them. Heard “I’m not really into horror films”? Try “I’m not really into football” or “I’m really into photography at the moment.” Once you’re making your own sentences, the phrase starts to belong to you.

• Try shadowing. Replay one short line and say it along with the speaker, matching their rhythm and tone. Nobody expects you to sound identical. It just gets your mouth used to natural English as well as your ears.

• Set a time limit. Ten or fifteen focused minutes can do more than an hour of swiping on autopilot.

Your feed can only take you so far

English videos are a good way in. You hear real voices, pick up everyday expressions and spend time with the language without opening a textbook.

Where a feed struggles is the next step, actually using what you’ve heard with another person. At IELC, learners get regular speaking practice and feedback, which gives all that watching somewhere to go.

So keep watching if you enjoy it. Every now and then, stop on a good phrase, say it out loud, and see if you can use it before the week is out.

References

Krashen, S. (1985). The Input Hypothesis

Schmidt, R. (1990). The noticing hypothesis

Peters, E. & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary learning through viewing L2 television

Montero Perez, M. et al. (2013). Meta-analysis on captioned video

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