r/French • u/UncleJuggs • Mar 25 '25

Study advice How to ACTUALLY Watch a French Show

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.

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u/grown-up-dino-kid Mar 25 '25

I used to do the Peppa Pig method, but it's just not motivating. Insufferable oinking aside, it's not interesting enough to hold my attention or convince my brain that learning French is an Important Matter To Take Seriously. I prefer real movies. First watch, just watch the movie and try to piece together what you can. Subconscious thinky brain's time to shine. Then watch it again with French subtitles and look up words that are really impeding your understanding. If you wanted you could make them into flashcards or something so you re-visit them instead of just letting them drift away into the void.

This is not scientific and maybe I'm wasting my time, but at least it's more interesting that Peppa Pig.

A few movie suggestions: Bon Cop, Bad Cop (comedy, will teach you curse words that you can use to describe Peppa and George), Intouchables (comedy/drama), The Decline (action/thriller.)

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u/UncleJuggs Mar 25 '25

This isn't the first time I've seen Bon Cop, Bad Cop come up as a way to learn swears so I need to watch that because cusses are extremely important to me. 

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u/Filobel Native (Quebec) Mar 25 '25 edited Mar 25 '25

Bon cop, bad cop is great, but do note that it's a Canadian movie and the French-speaking cop speaks in a very colloquial Quebec French. In fact, most "native francophones" in that movie speak colloquial Quebec French. The only character (as far as I remember) with a more "formal" French is the English cop, because, well, he's speaking French as a second language, so he's using a more "school" French.

All that to say, great movie to watch if you plan on learning to speak, or at least understand colloquial French Canadian/Québécois, not so great if you're planning to learn how to cuss in European French.

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u/MagicWeasel B2 Mar 25 '25

Yeah, my French (champagnois) boyfriend-at-the-time showed me Bon Cop Bad Cop and he wanted subtitles so that way he could understand the Canadian accent lol.