“Culture is a difficult thing to teach, and if you rely on textbooks what you get is stereotypes,” she said. Ouyang did in China 12 years ago.Īnother reason, said Ángela Larrea Espinar, a professor in the department of English studies at the University of Córdoba in Spain, is that people who teach foreign languages have gradually shifted over the last two decades from a “communicative” approach that emphasizes grammar to one that encourages cross-cultural understanding and reflection. YouTube, especially, allows nonnative speakers to watch clips without having to, say, buy pirated DVDs under a bridge, as Ms. “Friends” may have endured as a teaching tool in part because the internet has made it accessible to new generations of fans. Language teaching has changed in recent years. “Over time, I noticed that people stopped teasing her about her grammar. “But Rachel also grew a lot: She did well at her job and found her own path,” Ms. It was comforting, she added, to see Rachel make grammatical errors on her résumé.
Ouyang, who attended college in Ohio and now works as a film producer in Beijing, said that “Friends” gave her the confidence to make small talk with Americans. She was hooked from the first episode, in which Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston, meets the other characters in a wedding dress after abandoning her groom at the altar. Jamie Ouyang, 30, discovered the show during her last year of high school in south-central China when she bought a box set in her hometown, Changsha, for about $15. Konus began watching “nonstop,” she said, and learned far more about English than she had in years of grammar-based classes. Konus was teaching English at a military academy in Ankara, Turkey, six years ago when she noticed that her roommate kept laughing while watching “Friends” on a laptop. “She is very meticulous and clean and always insists on using a coaster because she hates when a cup leaves water stains on a table.”Ī few fans said they could pinpoint precisely when and where they saw “Friends” for the first time. “My favorite character is Monica because I think we have similar personalities,” she added. “‘Friends’ just seems to have the magic something that is even more attractive.”įans and educators on three continents echo the sentiment, saying that “Friends” is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan’s West Village. The humor in “Seinfeld” is a bit too gritty and New York-specific, for example, while “The Big Bang Theory” could come across as too much of a “scientific nerd thing.” Smith said, but they tend to be too particular for nonnative English speakers.
#FRIENDS REUNION 2021 TV#
Other seminal American TV shows can serve a similar learning function, Ms. After the United States, the most popular markets for her videos as a whole are Vietnam, India, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Smith posted in 2019 have received significantly more views per day on average - 839 - than those featuring other shows or movies, she said.
In one apparent sign of that, “Friends”-based learning videos that Ms. “But I’ve definitely never sensed that the time for it has passed.” “I’ve been on YouTube for 13 years and I have not been posting ‘Friends’ content the whole time,” said Rachel Smith, the founder of the learning site Rachel’s English, based in Philadelphia. But educators, academic studies and page-view data suggest that the show still has a wide following among English-language learners. Measuring the popularity of “Friends” as a teaching resource is an inexact science because so many people watch it outside of formal classrooms. ‘“Friends” just seems to have the magic something.’ Fans around the world, from Ghana to Mexico, also reminisced about how the show helped them cope with personal dilemmas or tragedies. The “Friends” reunion episode that premiered Thursday on HBO Max included a cameo by the members of BTS and scenes from the show that had been translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. Kim, who performs under the stage name RM, told the television host Ellen DeGeneres in 2017. “I thought I was kind of like a victim at that time, but right now, I’m the lucky one, thanks to my mother,” Mr. Over the years, several prominent celebrities have said that they learned English from “Friends.” The list includes Jürgen Klopp, the German soccer coach who helms Liverpool in the English Premier League a number of Major League Baseball players whose first language is Spanish and Kim Nam-joon, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS. “The themes, if you ask me, speak to everyone.” Konus, 29, said by telephone from her home in Monterey, Calif. “It’s really entertaining compared to other sitcoms, and it addresses universal issues,” Ms.
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