How Watching Korean Dramas Improved My Czech

Increase your reading speed, expand your vocabulary, and learn formal/informal conjugations during your downtime.

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Three years ago, the pandemic had just started and my mom wouldn’t be able to visit her home country for another year. No new books from the Czech Republic without exorbitant shipping fees. No Czech foods from the corner store Žabka. In 2020, few streaming services offered more subtitle options than English and Spanish unless you were using a VPN. Luckily, Netflix had just begun translating Korean dramas into Czech and was one of the first streaming services to stop region-locking its subtitles.

Long story short, we became hooked on K-dramas to pass the time.

Up to this point, I had never watched non-English media with Czech subtitles. In our household, my mom had always been the one dependent on subtitles for our American TV shows and movies. When I watched anime or Brazilian sci-fi shows, I had my comfortable English subtitles I could breeze across with my eyes and still catch everything happening on screen.

But now, my mom and I were watching shows in a language neither of us could understand. And that meant we had to use Czech subtitles as our lingua franca. I’d grown up with Czech as my first…