The Princess Bride

A few nights ago, I had some friends over to watch The Princess Bride. Although nearly every American and Canadian I know has seen it, my other friends had never heard of it before. I have, of course, seen the movie probably ten times or more, and I still find it thoroughly enjoyable.

To make things more interesting, I decided to introduce to them another concept that is fairly well-known in North America - the movie drinking game. If you do a Google search for "princess bride drinking game" you can see some examples. Essentially, this is how it works: you make a list of phrases or events that happen in the movie, and when those phrases are spoken or events happen, everybody watching the movie has to drink. Simple. There are more complex variations where each person chooses a character and whatnot, but this is the basic idea.

The list of phrases we used included such phrases as "true love", "man in black", "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," and, of course, "humperdink". Those of you who are familiar with the Miracle Max scene can understand why most of us weren't able to keep the game up for the whole movie. :)

I noticed an interesting side effect, though. One of my guests was Japanese, and she really doesn't speak any English at all. Yet, given a sheet of phrases to look for, she was able to pick out when those lines were said in the movie, sometimes even before I noticed. I'm only speculating here, but I would guess that if she were to just watch the whole movie start to finish with no drinking game, she would have simply tuned out and stopped listening to the dialogue. I've certainly done that enough with Japanese movies.

Dylan's Brilliant Idea of the Week

I propose that movie drinking games like this be introduced to the high school English curriculum, for a number of reasons:

• Drinking games are available for hundreds of popular movies and TV shows, providing large amounts of culturally-relevant course material.


• The vocabulary list, which is studied beforehand, helps the listener focus on key parts of the dialogue. I've seen this technique used in class before, where essential words and phrases are presented before reading a passage, and it can be quite effective in priming the mind and increasing comprehension.


• The drinking game aspect of this activity scales the difficulty of the game proportionally to the player's success rate. The more words you correctly identify, the more times you drink, and the more difficult subsequent words become. This makes it particularly useful for classes where the students have a wide variety of skill levels.


• Conversely, false positives are punished as well: if you mistakenly think you hear a key word, you have to drink, which makes the game more difficult and thus serves as a small penalty for your mistake, encouraging you to pay better attention so as not to avoid future penalties.


• The alcohol also helps to reduce inhibitions about speaking English, which is one of the most difficult challenges facing Japanese students today.


• Finally, since high school students aren't generally allowed to drink alcohol, making it legal for English class could help instill a heightened interest in English and reduce the "ho, hum, when will English class be over" attitude that I've seen in many of my students.

I wonder if any Japanese Ministry of Education officials read my blog... ;)