13 Movies to Learn English, Ranked from Easiest to Hardest to Understand

You turn on a movie meaning to practice your English. Twenty minutes later the Vietnamese subtitles are on, and you're watching it just like any other night. Three months and a dozen-odd shows later, you remember the plot clearly, and your English hasn't moved an inch.

Movies are still a good listening source, but they only turn into learning when two things are in place: the movie fits your ears at this point in time, and some action forces you to check whether you actually heard it or just guessed from the picture. Most movie lists online skip both, because they're ranked by how good the movie is, not by how hard it is to listen to.

The thirteen movies below are split into three groups by speaking speed and accent, each one noted with what accent it uses, how fast it talks, who it suits, and its difficulty point. Ahead of the list are two sections worth reading more than the list itself: how to use subtitles so your ears actually get to work, and how to turn a short scene into a listening exercise.

• Quick reference table of thirteen movies
• How to use subtitles the right way
• Group one: slow, clear dialogue
• Group two: medium speed
• Group three: fast talkers, heavy regional accents
• Transcribing a short scene: the exercise that turns a movie into listening practice
• Choosing a movie for your goal
• Frequently asked questions

Quick reference table of thirteen movies

This table is for picking something in under ten seconds. The speed column matters more than the level column: a movie that talks slowly about a hard topic is still easier to follow than a movie that talks fast about a familiar one.

How to use subtitles the right way

Subtitles aren't the enemy. Vietnamese subtitles are where it breaks down, because when two languages are on screen at the same time, the eyes always beat the ears. You finish reading the Vietnamese line before the English audio has finished the sentence, so your ears barely have to do any work.

The sequence below uses English subtitles as a ladder, then pulls the ladder away one step at a time.

1. Round one, turn on English subtitles and watch straight through. The only goal is to grasp what's happening and get used to each character's voice. Don't stop to look up words in this round.
2. Round two, pick a scene of about two to three minutes and turn the subtitles off. Listen to that scene a few times. You'll quickly notice which parts you understood thanks to the picture, not thanks to your ears.
3. Round three, turn English subtitles back on for that exact scene. Mark the sentences you missed, and sort them: missed because of an unfamiliar word, or missed because a familiar word got swallowed.
4. Round four, turn the subtitles off and listen one last time. If you still miss it even though you already know the words, the problem is in the sound, not in your vocabulary. That's useful information, not a failure.

When to drop subtitles for good: when you catch almost every sentence in a scene you've never watched before, without glancing down. That milestone arrives movie by movie, not once for every movie, so being able to turn subtitles off for Friends doesn't mean you can turn them off for Sherlock.

Group one: slow, clear dialogue

This group is for when you still have to strain your ears at every sentence. The shared traits are short sentences, everyday topics, and characters who rarely talk over each other.

Extra English

This is the only series on the list written specifically for learners. Channel 4 Learning made it between roughly 2002 and 2004, thirty episodes, built on the exact mold of a four-friends-sharing-a-flat sitcom. The character Hector is a foreigner newly arrived in London with a very thin stock of English, so the others speak slowly, repeat themselves, and explain things right within the dialogue. The accent is clearly enunciated British English. The weak point is that the dialogue was built for a classroom, so it isn't natural, and the setting is now over twenty years old; use it as the first rung and then drop it, don't stay long.

Friends

Ten seasons on NBC from 1994 to 2004, and still the series mentioned most whenever people talk about learning English through movies, for good reason. The dialogue revolves around dating, jobs, rent, and roommates — exactly the vocabulary you use every day. The laugh track dropped in after every joke creates a half-second pause, and that pause is exactly what helps your ears keep up. What you have to accept is that the vocabulary and cultural references belong to the 1990s, so there are jokes where you hear every single word clearly and still don't get why they're funny.

Modern Family

Eleven seasons on ABC from 2009 to 2020, shot mockumentary-style. The good part for learners sits in the segments where characters sit and talk straight into the camera: they say full sentences, nobody interrupts them, and the pace is noticeably slower than the rest of the show. This series also lets you hear non-native English through the character Gloria, something you'll run into more in real work than TV American accents. The hard part is the scenes where the whole family talks at once, where sentences pile on top of each other and you'll lose quite a lot.

The Good Place

Four seasons on NBC from 2016 to 2020, fifty-three episodes, each about twenty-two minutes. That length is a real advantage: you can watch a whole episode on your lunch break and still have the energy to re-listen to a scene. The dialogue is clear, and because the whole series revolves around right and wrong and choices, one cluster of vocabulary repeats often enough that you remember it without transcribing anything. Small note: the show has quite a few made-up words for its own particular world — don't waste time looking those up.

Inside Out

A 2015 Pixar animated movie. Because it's made for a young audience, the voice cast articulates more crisply than in live-action movies, and the pace of the dialogue is noticeably slower. A stock of emotion vocabulary runs through the whole movie, so you pick up exactly the cluster of words adult English learners often lack when they need to say how they're feeling. Two things to know going in: the climactic stretches speed up, and a kids' cartoon won't give you office English.

Group two: medium speed

This group suits you once you can follow a sitcom but can't yet follow a drama. Sentences are longer, the vocabulary is wider, but speakers still enunciate clearly enough for you to hang on.

The Crown

Six seasons on Netflix from 2016 through the end of 2023. This is close to a classroom in standard British accent: characters speak slowly, sentences are full with clear subject and verb, pauses are distinct, and the register is formal. If your ears are used to American English from Hollywood movies, this is the show for switching to the other side of the Atlantic without a shock. The limit sits in the vocabulary: royal affairs, ceremony, and British politics rarely get reused in your work emails.

The Devil Wears Prada

A 2006 movie, and one of the few commercial movies with a high density of office English: assigning work, locking in deadlines, apologizing to a boss, turning something down politely. The character Miranda speaks quietly, fast, and with little stress, so her scenes make better ear training than the rest of the movie. The obvious limit is that a single movie only gives you about two hours of listening, so treat it as one study session, not a course. If you want to widen the office-vocabulary side, the conversational English article goes deeper.

Ted Lasso

An Apple TV series, the first season came out in 2020 and the fourth season started airing in August 2026. Its particular value is putting American and British accents side by side in the same scene, so you hear the difference right there instead of switching movies. The dialogue is thick with sports idioms and office idioms, which is both its strength and its difficulty: a newcomer will hear every word clearly and still miss the meaning, because the meaning sits in the whole phrase. Note down unfamiliar phrases and look them up after the scene is over, don't stop partway through.

Our Planet

A Netflix nature documentary, part one released in 2019 and part two in 2023, narrated by David Attenborough. The narration is written first and then recorded, so it's slow, even, standard in pronunciation, and each sentence carries exactly one idea; the visuals also support the meaning for you, so you rarely lose the thread. This is a good source for getting used to formal English and to long sentences with subordinate clauses. What to remember is that this is written English read aloud, quite different from the English people actually speak to each other, so don't use it as a measure of your conversational listening.

Group three: fast talkers, heavy regional accents

This group isn't for beginners, and that isn't just a polite line. If you're not yet solid in group two, watching group three will only make you feel your English is worse than it really is. Once you have enough of a base, this is where your ears stretch fastest.

Sherlock

Four seasons from the BBC, 2010 to 2017. Benedict Cumberbatch describes his character's way of talking as speaking at the speed of thought, and the long deduction sequences are exactly what makes even native speakers turn subtitles on. Long sentences, high word density, and the character barely pauses between ideas. If you want to measure how far your ears have come, a Sherlock deduction scene is a blunt test. And if you're not around B2 yet, watching this show is more like listening to music than studying.

Peaky Blinders

Six seasons from the BBC from 2013 to 2022, plus the movie The Immortal Man landing on Netflix in March 2026. The difficulty here isn't speed but accent: the characters speak with a Birmingham accent, and according to the producers themselves, quite a few American viewers also have to turn on subtitles to keep up. Its value is teaching your ears that real English has more than one way of pronouncing the same word. Don't try to imitate this accent, just getting used to hearing it is enough.

Derry Girls

Three seasons on Channel 4 from 2018 to 2022, set in the city of Derry in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. The characters speak very fast, with a thick Northern Irish accent, and local slang so dense that plenty of native English-speaking viewers also have to turn subtitles on. Use this show to open up your ears, not to pick up vocabulary, since most of the slang in it you won't run into anywhere else. Each episode is short, so the cost of trying it is very low.

The Social Network

A 2010 movie, written by Aaron Sorkin, and a textbook example of fast, overlapping dialogue. The script runs 164 pages for a movie of about 120 minutes, meaning a word density well above the usual; the opening scene alone is nearly six minutes of two people talking back and forth without a break. Characters often discuss two things at once and cut each other off, exactly like a real meeting room. The vocabulary leans toward technology and legal matters, so it's a bit narrow, but if you work in that industry, that narrow slice is exactly the part you need.

Transcribing a short scene: the exercise that turns a movie into listening practice

Watching movies is passive input. It gets your ears used to rhythm and accent, but it doesn't force accuracy out of you, and listening progress only arrives once someone points out exactly where you just misheard something.

The cheapest exercise for adding accuracy: pick a scene of about thirty to sixty seconds, turn off the subtitles, then write down every word you hear, on paper or on your phone. Listen back as many times as you like, as long as you don't glance at the subtitles. Only turn the subtitles on to check once you've finished writing everything down.

The value is in the checking step. The words you miss are almost never hard words; they're usually of, have, to — words that get swallowed whole when people talk fast — or two words stuck together into a single block that your ears hear as a completely different word. Do a few scenes and you'll see your mistakes repeat in a handful of fixed patterns, and that's your own personal list of things to fix. The article 5 steps to effective dictation practice walks through each step in more detail.

Where movies can't help: they don't pre-cut sentences for you, subtitle transcripts don't always match the dialogue word for word, nobody grades your transcription, and nothing brings back the words you just got wrong the following week. You have to do all four of those things yourself. That's exactly the part WELE was built for: dictation practice on a library of over eight hundred podcast episodes with transcripts, graded down to every word, feeding the words you got wrong back to you on a spaced-repetition schedule, free to start. The other side needs to be said plainly too: WELE has no movies, doesn't teach you to get used to a Birmingham or Northern Irish accent, and can't replace the feel of hearing a line of dialogue with picture and context attached. Movies handle familiarization, dictation handles accuracy.

Before you start, measure yourself once so you have something to compare against later. The listening level test takes a few minutes and gives you a marker clearer than a gut feeling.

Choosing a movie for your goal

Pick one item below, take exactly two shows from it, and skip the rest of the article. Watching two shows all the way through beats opening ten and abandoning all of them.

Everything you hear sounds fast. Start with Extra English to get your ears used to catching a whole sentence, then move to Inside Out or an episode of The Good Place. Watch only short episodes, and always pair it with a no-subtitle re-listen of one scene, even if it's just thirty seconds.

You want to be able to understand British speakers. The Crown first, to get used to standard British English at a slow pace, then Sherlock once you're solid. Save Peaky Blinders and Derry Girls for the stage where you want to test yourself, not the stage where you're still building the foundation.

You need English for work. The Devil Wears Prada for office situations, Ted Lasso for idioms and for hearing two accents side by side, The Social Network if you work in tech. Note down phrases, not single words.

You don't have time to sit through a whole movie. Our Planet splits into ten-minute chunks without losing the thread. Beyond movies, YouTube channels for learning English come in lengths that fit into a schedule more easily, and if you'd rather listen than watch, how to choose a podcast by topic suits your commute. If you want to add reading and grammar, the list of English-learning books is in the article next door.

Frequently asked questions

Can watching movies alone make you good at English?

It gets you the listening-comprehension part and the feel for rhythm, not the accuracy part. Watch a lot without ever checking yourself and you get good at guessing, and guessing collapses the moment you have to listen to a work call with no picture to lean the meaning on.

Should beginners turn on Vietnamese subtitles?

For the first few episodes of your first show, it's acceptable — think of it as keeping you from giving up. But set a limit on it, for example switching to English subtitles once episode three is done, even if you feel you're not ready. The feeling of not being ready almost never goes away on its own.

Should you watch one movie many times, or many different movies?

Both, but in two different slots. Watch new shows to keep your enthusiasm up, and go back to one or two old scenes to train accuracy. Once you can hear a scene fully after three listens, drop it — keep the scenes you still miss.

How long should you watch each day?

Short and consistent beats long and erratic. One sitcom episode plus one re-listened scene is enough for a session, and it fits the amount of time most working people actually have. Watching three episodes back to back on the weekend and then resting the whole following week is the kind of studying that leaves little behind.

Are animated movies suitable for adults?

Yes, if you're at the stage where you need clear pronunciation and a slow pace. What to avoid is staying in that group too long, since the vocabulary in children's movies won't carry you to adult situations. Treat it as a rung on the ladder, not a place to settle.

What to do tonight is simple: pick a show in your exact group, watch one episode with English subtitles, then go back to one thirty-second scene and transcribe it. If you'd rather do that on content already cut into sentences and graded for you, start with one dictation exercise and compare again after four weeks.