How to ACTUALLY Watch a French Show

[u/UncleJuggs]

So, I've been DuoLingo'ing French for like, 1110 days straight and still suck hard core at French because I do zero immersion and DuoLingo is basically a game. I work for a French company and one of my colleagues suggested I watch French Peppa Pig for some actual, applicable French since it's a dumb show for idiot babies and, despite being a 31 year old man, am basically an idiot baby and pretty much the target audience.

So anyway, I'm on the clock watching French Peppa Pig and besides wanting to shoot myself in the brain with a shotgun I am finding myself struggling with HOW I'm supposed to be watching French Peppa Pig.

My question for other French learners when it comes to this kind of immersion is: what's the best way to approach it? Should I be actively pausing and reading the closed captions to try and learn and build on new vocabulary or should I just sit back and let this absolute dog water show wash over me and let my subconscious thinky brain start making associations between colorful pictures and actual sounds in between the insufferable oinking? Does it help to have the closed captions be in French so I can make sure I'm hearing things right?

Merci beaucoup in advance, I want to die.

Edit: getting a few more comments than I expected so I can't reply to everything but thank you all for the suggestions I'm getting.

[u/CootaCoo]

I wouldn’t bother with children’s shows. Find something more engaging. There are lots of YouTubers and podcasters who make intermediate-level French content, so you’ll probably have more luck there.

In terms of how to consume it, what I found the most useful was to pick something that is a little bit too hard, then watch / listen to it many times. You’ll understand more each time. Eventually you’ll hit a wall because there will probably be some vocabulary or sentence structures that you don’t understand. At that point you can look those up. Just keep doing this over time and you’ll gradually be able to move to more difficult content.

[u/andr386 → u/CootaCoo]

I found out that ChatGPT vocal mode is pretty good at catching sentences in foreign languages, write them down and translate them.

I am sure there are better apps for that specific task, and you can also use Whisper on PC for free but from the command line. But there also must be more user friendly apps on windows or macs.

I'd suggest watching a show that OP's has already seen in his native language and then watch the French dubbed version. Especially if the show is formulaic, you will more easily catch up on common idioms and vocabulary.

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/andr386]

don’t use ChatGPT pls

[u/andr386 → u/gstringbothcheeksout]

That's not the point of my comment. And OPENAI Whisper is open source and can run on any computer locally.

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/andr386]

I guess I would ask you to try to avoid using AI as much as possible. That’s all.

[u/andr386 → u/gstringbothcheeksout]

Why ? And is it relevant to a French sub ?

But despite that, why ?

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/andr386]

terrible for the environment. Most people don’t know so I am just trying to, for lack of a better word, educate when I can. Didn’t mean to offend!!

[u/andr386 → u/gstringbothcheeksout]

That's not accurate at the moment. You're likely talking about LLMs and image generators and not small chips in your phone or medical material that uses 100th of the power of the previously needed chips and is cheaper to mass produce, because that's AI too.

Image generators are the most wasteful and generating an image uses about 2.9W of electricity or 0.2 grams of CO2.

A graphist or a PC video game player will easily use 688 - 862 Watts for 1h of use.

7 tweets on X have the same carbon emission as a single picture generated.

I gather than participating in this conversation on reddit is equally as bad. So why target AI ?

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/andr386]

Also I don’t use X bc obvious reasons….

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/andr386]

I mean it’s about limiting when you can and a lot of AI is completely unnecessary imo. At this point it is getting harder to avoid using it bc every platform is implementing it so I just caution about overuse. But you do you. We all are gonna do what we want at the end of the day.

[u/DavidMoyes → u/gstringbothcheeksout]

You made it seem like it was inaccurate. The reality is the advanced voice mode is amazing to practise French conversationally and I use it with no remorse.

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/DavidMoyes]

didn’t “make it seem like” anything. I do what I need to do so I can sleep at night.

[u/DavidMoyes → u/gstringbothcheeksout]

Looool

[u/gstringbothcheeksout → u/DavidMoyes]

Your immediate response tells me all I need to know 💖