Learn a Foreign Language with Friends — The Best Episodes According to Data Science

Using data to find which Friends 236 episodes are the best for you to learn a new language and fun facts about the characters

Image created by author in Canva. Image of David Schwimmer via Netflix

Everybody knows that Friends is the most popular TV show for learning a foreign language, but do you know which episodes cover the basic and most difficult words? If you start re-watching Friends and carefully pick the episodes that have the highest number of basic words, you’ll understand their dialogue even more and have more fun watching Friends! I’ll also dive into Friends transcripts to find out more about the characters you know well, so you’ll find fun facts like how many times Joey said How you doin’?, who’s the most popular Friends character and the smartest one.

What Friends episodes among the 236 are the best for you to learn a foreign language?

I ranked all Friends episodes by difficulty in vocabulary as I previously did for TV series such as Game of Thrones, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory and Breaking Bad. To rank the episodes, I used vocabulary levels, which represent the 1000 most common English words. The episodes furthest to the right cover more basic (Lvl 1) vocabulary —…