The Best Disney Movies to Learn English According to Data Science | Towards Data Science

The first time I used Disney Plus, I was thrilled — and it wasn’t because of the Pixar and Marvel movies available in the catalog, but because of their content available in multiple languages.
English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, you name it! At that moment, I thought, “this is a good opportunity for learning foreign languages.” On top of that, we’re already familiar with some Disney movies, which is an advantage because it increases our chances of understanding the dialogue in any language.
But Disney+ has around 662 movies in its catalog. This is too much content to choose from, so I made a data analysis to find the best Disney movies that will help us learn a foreign language easily as I previously did for Netflix shows and 3000 top-rated movies.
The movies analyzed are from the Disney+catalog, so content from Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic were also included.
Table of Contents1. How Am I Choosing The Best Movies?2. The Best Disney Movies to Learn a Foreign Language - Ranking of The 300 Disney Movies - The Best Movies for Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Level - The Movie Genres With Simple and Hard Vocabulary3. Methodology - Data Collection - Tokenization - Lemmatization - Data Cleaning4. Final Note
To choose the best Disney movies to learn a foreign language, I used the transcripts that contain the dialogue in each movie.
Thanks to a wordlist created for corpus analysis in the linguistic field, I could find the difficulty of the vocabulary used in each movie. Then with some Python code, I created a ranking of the best movies that is based on the histogram below.
Don’t let the picture scare you! The important thing to know is that the simpler the movie's vocabulary, the easier to understand it. For example, the top 20 movies are the best because you only need to know the top 1000 most common words in a language to recognize at least 93% of the words.
The vocabulary in a language follows the Pareto rule. The top 1,000 most frequent words in a language make up over 80% of everyday conversation. Learning common words is a good opportunity for learning a foreign language!
Now that you know my definition of “best movies,” let’s find out which are the best Disney movies to learn a foreign language.
More details about the analysis are in the following sections.
The following are the 10 best Disney movies, in which you only need 1000 words to recognize at least 93% of the dialogues. There are 19 movies in the first bar previously shown, but I’m listing the 10 most popular to find a trade-off between movies with easy vocabulary and popularity:
The Last Song (2010)Pete’s Dragon (2016)The Parent Trap (1961 and 1998)Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam (2010)High School Musical 3 (2008)Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)Brother Bear (2003)A Wrinkle In Time (2018)The Straight Story (1999)Frozen 2 (2019)
The Last Song (2010)
Pete’s Dragon (2016)
The Parent Trap (1961 and 1998)
Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam (2010)
High School Musical 3 (2008)
Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)
Brother Bear (2003)
A Wrinkle In Time (2018)
The Straight Story (1999)
Frozen 2 (2019)
But that’s not all! The analysis goes beyond the top 10 movies. You don’t become fluent in a foreign language by only watching 10 movies, right?
If you want to find the top 20, 50, 100 or challenge yourself and watch the movie that ranks #300 (the one with the most difficult vocabulary), you just need to search them in the table below.
For example, I enjoyed watching the movie Finding Nemo when I was a kid, so to know whether that’s a good choice to watch in Spanish or Portuguese, I just type Finding Nemo in the box and find its ranking.
So, I found that Finding Nemo is in #123 in the ranking. Not bad; however, Finding Dory ranks #70, so I think I’ll watch that one first to improve my language skills.
If you want more customization, then you can find the perfect movie for your language level in the plot below. Unlike the previous analysis, where we only focus on the most common 1000 words (beginner level), in this case, we also analyze the percentage of dialogues that the most common 2000 and 3000 words cover in each movie.
If 300 movies aren’t enough for you, check my other articles to find the best Netflix movies and shows and the best 3000 most popular movies for learning a foreign language.
In case you’d like to know more about how to learn languages by watching TV shows and movies, I wrote a complete guide explaining how I learned 3 languages so far by watching TV.
medium.com
After obtaining the results for this analysis, I couldn’t help noticing that many documentaries rank in the last 10, so I spent some of my time watching some of them to obtain a better understanding.
After watching The African Lion, Dolfin Reef and The Living Desert on Disney Plus, I realized that the vocabulary might be challenging for most language learners. Unless you’re into flora and fauna, I wouldn’t recommend watching that kind of content if your goal is to become fluent in a foreign language.
On the other hand, the top 10 contain movies from different genres, so I can’t come up with a conclusion about the best movie genre to learn a foreign language. I’ll try to make a different analysis in this regard.
I did all this analysis in Python. The details are on my Github. These were the steps I followed:
For this analysis, I used 2 datasets — the Disney Plus catalog and movie transcripts. I googled movie transcripts to find as many Disney movie transcripts as I could get. In the end, I only found around 400, but after the cleaning process, only 300 transcripts remained for the analysis.
Then I downloaded the Disney Plus catalog dataset available on Kaggle. It consists of titles available on Disney Plus as of 2020. I used the catalog to match the transcripts with the titles available on Disney Plus.
To analyze the vocabulary in the transcripts, I tokenized all words spoken by characters. There are many tools for tokenization in Python, but I used CountVectorizer because it converts the transcripts collected to a dataframe of token counts, which simplifies the analysis. I explained a bit more about how the CountVectorizer works in the article where I analyzed 3000 movies.
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizerfrom sklearn.feature_extraction import text import scipy.sparsecv = CountVectorizer()cv_matrix = cv.fit_transform(df_analysis['transcripts'])df_dtm = pd.DataFrame.sparse.from_spmatrix(cv_matrix, index=df_analysis.index,columns=cv.get_feature_names())df_dtm = df_dtm.T
After tokenizing, I had to find the base form of each token. You can do this by using lemmatization techniques, which you can find in the NLTK library. However, I used word-family lists that do a similar job and also give you the level of difficulty of each word based on its frequency. As of 2020, there are 29-word-family lists and you can find some of them here. These lists were evaluated on research papers in linguistics and English learning as a second language.
I removed words that couldn’t be heard in the movies, such as scenes’ descriptions and speakers’ names. The cleaning method I used is far from perfect, but it helps me standardized the dialogues within transcripts. The clean_transcripts file I used is available on my Github.
I also excluded transcripts whose dialogue had more than 4.5% of words that didn’t match the word-family lists (they could be outliers or corrupted data). I usually used 3.5%, but in this case, I watched some of the movies that had between 3.5% and 4.5% and I didn’t find anything weird in the transcripts.
from cleaning import clean_transcriptsround1 = lambda x: clean_transcripts(x)df_analysis['transcripts'] = df_analysis['transcripts'].apply(round1)...df_statistics = df_statistics[df_statistics[100]<4.5]
In this analysis, we found the best Disney movies to learn a language. It’s a great idea to start with easy movies, so we have less trouble understanding dialogues and more fun watching the scenes. However, also consider watching movies you like, so pick movies you like that rank high.
The transcripts used for the analysis are in English. I tested the results for some languages like Spanish and Portuguese and they work fine. I would say that this works well for romance languages, but I can’t guarantee the same results for other languages.
Please let me know if the movies still have an easy vocabulary by watching them in the language you’re learning.