Thanks for watching! There are 7+ channels to watch Spongebob / Nickelodeon in different languages: German: www.youtube.com/@NickelodeonDeutschland Spanish: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/eauhacKi08DLf2g.html Korean: www.youtube.com/@NickKorea French: www.youtube.com/@NickelodeonFrance Japanese: www.youtube.com/@NickelodeonJapan Hebrew: www.youtube.com/@nickelodeonIsrael/videos Arabic: www.youtube.com/@NickelodeonArabia English: www.youtube.com/@SpongeBobOfficial EDIT: adding more languages

I believe in the beginning any animation is better than live-action content because it is dubbed by default. Dubbed voices are almost always clear and distinct while live-action on set recordings can sometimes turn into Churchill meme. Old movies especially suffer from this.

The fact i speak english is quite literally proof of the impact media has on language development

South korean football player Son Heung-Min is proof of this, having allegedly learnt German by watching spongebob

what i find frustrating about this strategy is that sometimes the captions aren’t the exact same words as what the characters are saying

I am watching Peppa Pig (pipsa possu) in finnish and I have been learning so much faster. Honestly I am also excited to watch it everyday.... it's fun. Also, the sentences are short and useful (Pippa and her friends pretend they are at a supermarket (so you can learn how a native would talk in this situation); they have episodes where a character is sick and they call a doctor, etc. I think those phrases are very useful

Disney+ has content dubbed in many languages, I've been watching Phineas & Ferb in Swedish

I used LazyTown songs to learn Icelandic pronunciation. It was a very useful technique

I'm going through The Last Airbender / Legend of Korra at the moment (which are kind of kids shows but not really, especially the latter). I've seen these shows so much I know the iconic dialogue by heart, especially with context. Watching it again but in German, I'm amazed at how fast I was able to pick up the essential words, and after half a season I don't even notice it being in German anymore. I'm just enjoying the show, but at the same time it feels kind of fresh because it's in a new language. Would definitely recommend! Anyway keep up the good work! As a fellow engineer your data-driven approach really speaks to me, and it helped my carve out my path for language learning. Vielen Dank!

Well, that explains why reading Asterix worked so well for learning French and Latin

I haven't watched any kids shows in German yet, but I'm absolutely gonna go binge Spongebob auf Deutsch in a moment!

Pepper Pig is free on YT and in pretty well every language you can think of.

What helped me learn english when i was a child, was actually Thomas the Tank Engine show that I used to watch in English more, now I'm trying to learn Spanish using anime dubs like Dragon Ball, Doraemon and many others

We actually learned the words “amigos” AND “esponja Bob” in my Spanish class, implying both are important

I've definitely used the Nickelodeon Deutschland channel on KZfaq, but I keep running into the same issue: in order to be engaging to children, the voices are often exaggerated to the point of being difficult to discern the precise sounds in a word. Subtitles help with this immensely, but they aren't always available (and the auto-generated ones aren't always accurate). All that said, I definitely agree that kids shows are a super useful tool for beginners and intermediate learners alike.

Why is this genius idea never crossed in my mind. I've used Drama, Music, Anime, Movie, Audiobook as my immersion when learning Japanese I'm sold out man, thank you so much!

What's good about the internet age is that many of these companies have branches where they post clips, trailers, and songs from their various shows. For Spanish, there's like a Disney LATAM and Disney España

If you read the chart at the end and also wondered if the Japanese language had any other word for sponge besides the English loanword, another word for sponge (the animal and not the tool/material) is 海綿 「かいめん」, of the same etymology as the simplified chinese one in the chart. And yeah, it is composed of the characters for sea 海 and cotton 綿. Enjoy your two free words.

I’ve always enjoyed animations more than adult shows so I’ve actually been doing this for a while since I’m learning german too. I watched quite a few seasons of Miraculous Ladybug and Cuphead in German dub, but I’m also watching anime in german dub too! It’s pretty fun actually

I literally learn to speak English because the only cartoon shows on the TV & popular youtube videos when I was young were English. There was a point in my life were I've watched so much english content to the point the I cant talk back at people without talking like foreigner who's learning the language for the first time, I know what they are saying but I dont know how to say it in our language without using english words lol.

This is an incredibly well researched video. This channel deserves to blow up

I watched the first three seasons of Spongebob (the ones I grew up with) dubbed in Japanese at age 27-28 and had an absolute blast. If you grew up with something and feel nostalgic towards it, especially something like Spongebob that we as a society still meme on as adults, it's really worthwhile IMO. I've begun learning German lately (about a month ago, mostly Anki sentences/phrases with audio but I've been mixing in watching stuff on Disney+ a little) and would love to do this. I need to figure out what I need to do to watch it in German. In Japanese I jumped through some hoops to buy these seasons on Amazon Prime JP and use(d) a VPN to watch, though IIRC last I looked I think they're on Hulu JP without a purchase? Again, with VPN.

As always, great content!

This is so good! Def adding this to the list

Another very interesting video, based on facts, not blah blah. I like this! Looking forward to see more of you.

I don’t know if you’ll see this but as someone with adhd, seeing all this put together in such an easily digestible, logical format inspires me to learn more than anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched very little of what you have to offer, but I don’t think I’m going to stop watching anytime soon. Thank you for making sense.

Is this a Artscroll Gemara in the background? My man is a man of culture ❤

Did this myself when I first started learning spanish and it seems like a no brainer. I also combined watching kids TV shows with reading kids books and that seemed to work really well for me. If immersion/comprehensible input is truly the key to language learning then starting with content that is more comprehensible to a beginner level should be the standard practice for learning language.

I'm currently using this approach to learn French and Russian. At the very beginning I was only using terror/horror movies, which are the ones I love and I started by watching those I already knew in my own language. But then I realised it was more practical to use a TV series because of what you pointed out, the repetition of patterns and vocabulary, and it was more manageable to see an episode daily than a full movie. So I started to watch 'Stranger Things' which has only four seasons compared to 'Spongebob' many more. I didn't see 'Stranger Things' before in my own language, so I actually have only seen it in French and in Russian. There are fewer episodes so what I do is go back to season one again. It´s fascinating how every iteration I catch something new I didn´t get last time so I know this approach is getting results. I've also seen 'Death Note' because episodes are shorter so when I didn´t have enough time at least I had something done daily and also to add a different content (after watching something 10 times it starts to get boring). Death note use a much more different 'tone', at least in the russian version I´ve seen, so it's adding more vocabulary (or I believe so). Anyways, I've been doing this for the last year and half and I´m starting to test myself online, so take this with a grain of salt, and I'm now at around B1 level. I thought I was going to be fluent by the end of this year but I now think it's going to take me much, much longer, but since I don't have to study and just watch something I find amusing it's not really a downer for me. A note for those who use this approach: having a 100% perfect transcrypt is not likely going to happen, but more than being a problem it's a bless because you are expanding your vocabulary twice (your brain will pick what they say and what's written even tho it's not entirely the same but is used in the same way). So, don´t let that bother you and keep watching content. Finally, (I'm sure nobody will read to this very bottom but... ) I'm trying to learn chinese this way, but I haven´t found any TV series with chinese dubbing apart from 'Peppa Pig' here in youtube. Sadly Peppa it´s not very engaging for me, so If anyone knows another dubbed TV kids of series... let me know!

I'm curious if you have any plans to do a full test of this theory and to do your own 100 day challenge to see how accurately it lines up with what your data suggests.

thanks for anki deck . it's best and challenging deck to learn through, words you have picked are helpful and to aware about in the conv and irl which decks i have don't it as the same way yours deck do . kudos

This was really interesting, thank you ☺️

I love numbers and am currently learning German, I love watching your videos, thank you for all the effort you put into them! ! :)

Loved this! A really unique video idea 😊

I'm learning english by watching your videos. Keep up the good work.

5:39 "Steal Secret Recipe". What a fun little detail

I did this with avatar the last air bender a few years ago in French. It was great. I was able to understand everything being said by the end of the series! Wonderful video. Thanks for doing what you do

When Krashen meets computational linguistics.

Great video! I'll try this out with my girlfriend to teach her Norwegian! Seems like a fun daily ritual to watch a "Svampebob Firkant" episode together Also, instantly spotting 'kill' right next to 'myself' at 5:25 felt a bit creepy, haha

I recently started doing this with SpongeBob specifically actually so it’s great to see you. Do an analysis on it. My one question is what level should you be at to start engaging in something like this?

Fantastic video, thanks

Amazing video!!!

I liked how you aproach to the language learning process. Now I'm learning French and I'd be so happy If someone recommend me interesting French cartoons.

and that's why i'm watching miraculous ladybug in the original french dub - thank you very much for that video, it was once again very informative!!

I am from Bulgaria where we study English and I learned german as a kid from spongebob and other shows on SuperRTL. It was an amazing television program

Good quality video! You definitely deserve a larger audience and i appreciate your content. Longer footnote: I see that you have spent quite some time with German which is the same language i'm trying to conquer so i was wondering specifically if you have any recommendations for how to improve general language skills in just 3 months preparing for a C1 exam (I'm B1/B2). Is it better to focus on vocab or grammar and do i achieve that goal through more reading, watching tv shows or flaschards?

I use lingq to auto-generate audio description (they use AI and it is 99% correct). I download the audio from the episode first and then send it to lingq. It's very helpful.

When I lived in Thailand I was there for like a year and only learned the basics. Just having Thai friends help me. They mostly wanted to practice English though. Then I discovered a kids channel, like kindergarten level lol, and started watching that everyday and my vocab exploded. After doing that for like a month I could start to have basic conversations with people where we could understand each other but I spoke like a child. As my skill moved up I started to watch shows for older kids then adults. That was like 10 years ago. I'm pretty fluent in Thai, even though I don't even live there anymore. I also have a pretty good accent according to them.

this is an awesome test/experiment

3:37 LMAO I'm crying

i am so lucky that my current favorite show is a chillean childrens show :) its helped so much with comprehension

Thanks a lot. This video motivates me to continue watching German TV channel for kids which is ZDF TiVi

Gravity Falls cartoon helped me a lot in learning English. It's very interesting and the characters speak clearly in it

Ive had access to eurpean kids tv channels growing up in the middle east (the power of cable) so i watched SpongeBob in different languages, and it definitely helped me learn a lot of foreign words all thanks to the dialogue's pacing and colorful visuals. it definitely made me interested in learning more languages and now that I'm studying japanese I'm still using SpongeBob and it's japanese dub to learn more words and phrases haha!

I learned a great deal of japanese from watching Slice of Life anime, which includes a lot of day to day topics that are helpful for learning. I also learned some portugese and spanish from playing Farcry 6 with portugese subtitles, as a lot of the latin roots of spanish and portugese are pretty easy to understand just by reading them. I dont know how to verbalize any of the language yet, but i know how to read portugese just fine

Amazing. Thank you

chibi maruko-chan was the best immersion content for me back when i was trying to acquire chinese!

Thanks for the vid, it was interesting and not unnecessarily long 😆 I wish I could find Spongebob in french

This video hits close to home. 3 years ago, when I started learning English seriously in order to start college, I was stuck for a while in the beginner stage. I tried learning advanced stuff but couldn't for the life of me to learn anything useful. Then, one day, I saw my younger siblings watching the arabic version of phineas and ferb. At that moment, I got the idea: What if I watch the original English version. At the time, I thought of it as last ditch effort to learn english that I would have to slog through or I would end up joining an arabic university, which I wasn't looking for. But after starting the show, I was impressed, it was actually fun and I enjoyed watching it a lot. After finishing phineas and ferb, I watched spongebob and a few other shows. This step was really important in my language learning journey as it transferred me from learning English as a subject to understanding it mentally without thinking about grammar and other stuff. A few months after that, I took the IELTS exam, and I got 6.5, which I was very proud of. So, yes, I think learning English from cartoons is a really good method if you're open minded about it and enjoy your journey while doing it.

I watched bli sodot while learning Hebrew, and it helped me a lot!

The tangible proof is that a 5 year old kid which is already fluent in English, can speak confidently and a good pace even though their vocab isn’t advanced but those bases are what will makes us advanced someday

As a bilingual speaker I can say that cartoons are really important for the increase of language skills especially for children. I am a native speaker of two languages, but I speak one of them much better than the another. One of the reasons why this happened to me was because as a child, I did not watch cartoons in one language as often as in another. I remember how easily I learned many words I had never heard before by vivid images of those words. It really improved my vocabulary. SpongeBob is also a big part of this growth.

I watch Bluey to learn Dutch and definitely recommend it for any language!! SO GOOD

אהבתי, תודה!

Avatar The Last airbender is a great tool for learning English. Actually, I'm not into kids TV but this show is really cool. I even tried to watch Pokemon, that I would like when I was younger, but today I find it really boring, but the language is very accessible. So if you like it, give it a try.

Well, your video inspired me. I am fluent in English and I love Germany, my father went to Germany for work when he was young and I intend to move there, so with your encouragement, I will test your theory in practice. I will be watching series like SpongeBob in german for 100 days to help me understand the basics of german and I will bring the result of the 100 days here.

You won a subscriber tank for content very good. 🎉

Watched 500+ episodes of Doraemon in the Vietnamese dub it helped a lot

I was hoping you'd actually do it... but no worries youve motivated me to try it myself

I've actually done this before with Spanish and Japanese and got different results. Albeit I've gone well over 100 days and more into several years, here's what happened. I used to watch A LOT of anime, Japanese dramas, and play video games in Japanese. It helped me get used to hearing words and phrases, but I never became fluent, and I didn't understand proper grammar. On the other hand, I've read Spanish a lot. For some friends who struggled with English, I'd ask them to text me in Spanish. As long as it was written, I could understand most of what's said. However, I couldn't speak it or listen to it because I'm not used to hearing Spanish at the pace of a native speaker. This continued for a long time (well over two years for both). I didn't really interact with the two languages, but rather I was more like a spectator. Eventually, I took classes to learn Spanish. Being in a setting that encourages interaction accelerated my learning. I could apply what I knew previously with ease. After about three months, I was able to hold conversations with native speakers. All of this being said, I'd like to bring up one more detail. I don't have any friends who know English as their native language. They all learned English through media: TV, video games, KZfaq, Twitch etc. Interacting in communities with English is how they learned. Only one friend took classes, formal or not. So it can be done. Someone can definitely learn a language by watching media as long as you're also interacting with others who speak the language.

If you guys have any tips on where to find children shows, please comment here ! (Specially in mandarin)

I think anything can help if makes you keep watching, it's the consistency the most important thing and is so much more easy continue if you really like and want watch

I'm Slovene, but only a few of my VHS tapes are in my native language while most are in German and for that reason, I never chose to learn German in primary school.

1:50 which episodes are the massive outliers?

This briefs so damn well. Aaaaaand now I wanna watch Spongebob. SOB...

My Spanish and French are really good, but because I was learning languages for the first time, and was still figuring things out, I somehow managed to skip some pretty basic vocabulary that most kids know. So I'm left in the pretty hilarious situation where I can follow along with the entire plot of French drama miniseries, but I wouldn't for the life of me be able to tell you the French word for pillow. I just looked it up, and it's "oreiller" How have I not heard that word before?

Danny Phantom. Always. Danny is love, danny is life.

Can’t wait to blast SpongeBob in german every night, my girlfriend is going to love me

It's even better if you can find a show that is native to the language you're learning. There are so many great old Soviet cartoons that are really fun to watch and great for learning Russian as they were made by native speakers for kids so it's easy to learn, is guaranteed to be correct and fits within the cultural context of the language, even if a bit dated in the case of Soviet stuff.

idk if this is meant to be a question for the audience lmao but in my case it did. was watching subbed power ranger since before i learned my native language in kindergarten, then when i started learning it i could read the subtitles and attach some english phrases to what i understood from the subs. developed a deep vocabulary and understood how most phrases and sentences in english are supposed to sound, without understanding the grammar behind it. obviously it wasnt a perfect understanding of english’s ins and outs, but for a 4th grader its basically fluency

I taught myself English for 6 years and reached C1 (Band7) last year. I studied Spanish and Chinese 4 years ago and I’m currently studying French. Based on my experience, the majority of TV shows for adults are a bit too advanced when you’re at any level lower than B2. Obviously, even though it totally depends on which series you actually watch but mostly, A1,A2: kids shows B1: KZfaq B2: KZfaq and relatively easy shows for adults C1, C2: shows for adults

If you use content about something you are deeply familiar with, like your job or farming if you grew up on a ranch, it can make the content you seek in your target language very approachable and understandable, even if you don't understand any word.

this is so cool! do you recommend having eng subtitles on with the language dubbed? or keep eng subtitles off? or even put the dub language as subtitles too?

this is rad. will be watching spongebob in spanish now

The critical thing is to like the programme before you commit. I could not watch sponge 100+ times.

I'm wondering if I should do foreign language shows with my kids. Growing up I watched an insane amount of spongebob and looney tunes in Turkish and felt it helped me a ton as a kid. I have little ones of my own now and am wondering if showing them German would help them (and me...) learn German.

Where did you find full episodes of SpongeBob? I'm trying to watch it in Spanish with subtitles but I can't find it anywhere with subs.

I grew up in the States and in China 50/50 (in that order.) Catching up to the local language when I moved to Mainland China after middle school in the boondocks of the Midwest was a real struggle bus. Long story short, I actually went ham on watching shows like SpongeBob dubbed in Mandarin (and other native shows) to pick up my proficiency. Worked out pretty well. Would love to reach out and offer anecdotal feedback on the video topic. Bless. Incidentally, the Mandarin dub of SpongeBob was of a Taiwanese variant. Certain words like 乐色桶 vs 垃圾桶 kinda gave away to my classmates just exactly where I was getting my extracurricular education lol.

Please 1:43... I need to know what those 4 outlier episodes are with nearly double the spoken words, and that lone episode in Season 3 with nearly half the amount.

I was Born in poland, as a kid i was visiting my grandma in Germany, i got put in Front of the tv early 2000, i loved spongebob so much, suddenly after about a time i picked up german automatically, now i live in germany since around 2010, I can speak polish German and English pretty well 👀

@OneWordataTime1 would this also work with videos games since your more engage with your target language?

I found watching simple kids or your favorite movies in target language (with subs in that language) helps learning. I watched bluey in Japanese which really helped to hear casual talking, but then watched Deadpool 1 & 2 which helped with swears and other words I remembered from the movies. Need a healthy mix and a descent Disney + subscription.

In language learning of course learning words is a must but you’ve never taiked about common or frequent phrases or the chunks. By the time i was learning english always i felt the importance of frequent phrases. Please make a detailed video on common or frequent phrases importance in second language learning🖤

As an anglophone who learnt Spanish and now at level C1 starting from 2016, my best advice is to watch your favourite shows/film in the language you want to learn (since you know what it's about you're just hearing a new way to describe those concepts) and DEFINITELY watch children shows (Peppa pig, SpongeBob, bluey, ect) it helps SO much.

It's definitely a valid strategy. I was able to learn Japanese and speak at an N5 level after 3 years of watching just anime (albeit a lot of it). That was in 2020. Now I've made a lot of Japanese friends and can comfortably have day-to-day conversations. I would say formal teaching I took later on contributed maybe 15% to my overall ability. I can barely read or write though, which has caused a lot of awkwardness in restaurants when I ask for an English menu.

I'm learning Russian, should I watch Russian dubbed spongebob? I grew up with Spongebob and I feel like it would improve my learning by watching the familiar material, I'd already know what most episodes were about so I'd have a good way to figure out the meaning of the words

It certainly can, sincei used to watch English cartoons to learn it since english isnt my first language ^_^

IF YOU ARE TRYING TO *RELEARN* A LANGUAUGE: Set all your netflix and amazon shows to that language, its crazy how fast this works.

I ALSO need to point out the "'wanna', 'k*ll', 'myself'" in the middle of 5:26 lol

when reading in a foreign language, should we write down new words and review them (for example with anki) or just extensively read?