What Shawshank Redemption Taught Me About Your English

By Richard Marshall

What Shawshank Redemption Taught Me About Your English

I came home from the pub one evening, which in Spain means something slightly different to what it means in England but the sentiment is the same, and Shawshank Redemption was on the television.

I've seen that film more times than I can count, all the way through my twenties, and I love it in the way you love something that got to you before you were old enough to be cynical about things, so I sat down, and it took me a good thirty seconds to realise it was in Spanish.

I tried to change the language, the way you normally can, flipping between audio tracks, but for some reason it wasn't working, and so I just sat there watching Andy Dufresne escape through a river of sewage in my second language, and I could follow it, not because my Spanish is perfect, it isn't, but because I knew the script well enough that the language almost didn't matter, and my brain was just letting it in.

And then a thought arrived that I wasn't expecting.

I imagined my twenty-year-old self watching this film for the first time, and I thought: what if someone had told him, sitting there in his twenties with no Spanish whatsoever, that one day he would watch this film and understand it in another language. That he would start learning that language at thirty-four, not as a student in a classroom but because he fell in love with a woman from Madrid in a bar in London, and that ten years later he would be sitting on a sofa in Spain following Morgan Freeman's voice in Spanish without subtitles.

He would not have believed it.

Because I genuinely never thought I could speak another language. I used to watch James Bond switching between French to Arabic, then to Italian in some super cool casino and think: how clever do you have to be to hold all of those words in your head and put them in the right order without reading them off a page? For me that was something that other people did. People far more gifted. People whose brains worked differently from mine.

And yet there I was.

Which is when I realised something I now use with my clients regularly. One of the most powerful things you can do for someone who is convinced their English isn't good enough is show them something they already understand, something they last watched twenty years ago in their own language, and let them sit with the fact that they can follow every word of it now in English without any help at all.

Because the progress is real. It's just invisible when you're inside it.

So if you have been telling yourself that your English isn't improving, or that you've plateaued, or that you simply don't have the time or the aptitude for this, try something this week. Find a film or a series you know well, something you watched years ago in Spanish, and put it on in English. Watch it the way you'd watch anything. Let it land.

And notice how much of it does, without any effort at all.

That's your Guide speaking.

The one that's been there all along, quietly doing the work while the other voices were making all the noise.

Watch the clip from my podcast From Lost To The River below, where I talk about this in full:

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If this resonates, I've been exploring how language, mindset and identity shape the way we speak English on my podcast, From Lost to the River. You can listen at procoachenglish.com/podcast (by CLICKING HERE) and on all major streaming services as well as YouTube.

And to learn more about working together, you'll find everything HERE.