Advice on transcribing videos

[Kraut]

Kick the videos and do dictations:

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... francaises

https://www.podcastfrancaisfacile.com/a ... s-fle.html

https://www.podcastfrancaisfacile.com/d ... -delf.html

https://www.lalanguefrancaise.com/gener ... -francais/

https://unedicteeparjour.fr/

[DaveAgain]

I mainly watch factual stuff (history, science, travel, cooking etc.).

I don't mind the odd TV show and action/thriller film too.

BBC Four did go through a period of showing Spiral, which I absolutely loved - however, I watched it with the English subtitles and it did not help me at all as far as French goes. In fact, I almost questioned whether they were speaking French at first.

That was a while back and hopefully my French has improved since then - furthermore, I realise that something like Spiral is going to be a particular challenge for a learner. I assume that it was full of police/crime slang and it probably lived up to the stereotype that hardened police officers and murderers do not speak perfect French. Furthermore, all the car chases etc. made hearing the dialogue even more incomprehensible.

Arte.tv is mostly documentaries. They put some of their programmes on YouTube too.

There are a number of french language cooking channels on YouTube, a little safari there might introduce you to something you like. French language radio is an option too.

[elsmandino]

Those diction exercises are really helpful - filling in the blanks is probably what I am after, for the time-being, until I am good enough to transcribe everything.

Arte.TV might become one of my new favourite sources - thanks very much for the recommendation.

Not only does it show things that I might watch anyway, but it seems that the narrations are a little bit slower and pronounced properly - really helpful at the moment. Furthermore, whilst I shall try and fight the urge to put on the subtitles, they seem to be very accurate in relation to the spoken dialogue.

Amazing - merci bien!

[zjones]

When I was learning German, I found listening a little bit easier - even if I had never heard a heard word before, as everything is pronounced, I could easily look it up as I had a very good idea of how it would be approximately spelt.

I am finding that with French, if there is a word I cannot understand, I try to look it up and find that it doesn't exist. Hopefully, this is something that will go away in time, but it is a bit frustrating.

This is so true. French orthography and phonology are only distantly related. I think French is the second worst among all European languages, with the obvious exception of English.

The French orthography and phonology may not be closely related, but there are rules that make spelling fairly straightforward. Don't worry, the more you are exposed to French, the easier it will be to guess the orthography of specific words. Try using a dictionary that does not require exact spelling. Wordreference will recommend words if you're a couple of letters off, and you can pick one from the drop-down.

If you're really far off, I'd recommend listening to audiobooks while reading along (to familiarize yourself with the sounds and words together), and working on phonology so you know which sounds the vowels make.

[Cavesa]

Those diction exercises are really helpful - filling in the blanks is probably what I am after, for the time-being, until I am good enough to transcribe everything.

You might like Lyricstraining. You can fill the blanks in the song lyrics, and there are several levels of difficulty (the songs are sorted by difficulty, and you can also choose from three levels of how many words are gonna be left out for you to write).

The French orthography and phonology may not be closely related, but there are rules that make spelling fairly straightforward. Don't worry, the more you are exposed to French, the easier it will be to guess the orthography of specific words. Try using a dictionary that does not require exact spelling. Wordreference will recommend words if you're a couple of letters off, and you can pick one from the drop-down.

If you're really far off, I'd recommend listening to audiobooks while reading along (to familiarize yourself with the sounds and words together), and working on phonology so you know which sounds the vowels make.

I couldn't agree more.

Btw, I find it funny when the English speakers or learners criticise the relation between the French spelling and phonology.

Learn the rules and you'll have a much better time reading stuff and also transcribing. It may look like there is a lot to learn at first. But once you get through the basic rules, you will apply them everywhere and few things will surprise you. Really, English is much worse. I've got to C1, I've been using it every day for years. But still, there are new words I encounter sometimes, and I am not always sure how to read them. This is something the learners of French or German don't need to be afraid of.

Audiobooks and reading along are another great suggestion.

But just learning the rules might save you lots and lots of time and keep you from accidentally learning mistakes.

[zjones]

English is much worse. I've got to C1, I've been using it every day for years. But still, there are new words I encounter sometimes, and I am not always sure how to read them.

I'm a native speaker and I still run into words that I have no idea how to pronounce because English orthography is such a mess. And I can mispronounce word for years before someone corrects me -- the reason for the delay being that nobody else knows how to pronounce the word correctly either. Not to mention the spelling issues that have stuck around since I was a kid: is broccoli with two L's or two C's? Does vacuum have two C's or just one? It's stupid I know, but these mispellings [sic] hang around because there aren't any solid rules concerning double letters in English, unlike in French where SS/S and LL/L have general rules.

I'm sorry for the digression!

[golyplot]

I too am a native English speaker who sometimes doesn't know how to pronounce things. There are rules that English speakers unconsciously use to pronounce unfamiliar words, but ultimately, language is defined by its usage, so if the words in question are sufficiently obscure, your audience probably doesn't know how to pronounce them either and the correct pronunciation is whatever you feel like, as long as it is at least plausible based on the spelling.

Heck, TvTropes has an entire article on the subject (or at least the related subject of fantasy name pronunciation). To make things even more confusing, there are many words that are pronounced differently depending on the dialect ("either" and "advertisement" come to mind). And when you are dealing with loanwords or foreign names, all bets are off.

Of course, I also have the habit of (for some reason) developing pronunciations that don't make any sense from the spelling, usually due to misplacing a few letters when reading and then having the mistake fossilized. For example, for a long time, I pronounced "avatar" as ARR-va-tar after presumably hallucinating an extra "r". Likewise, I used to pronounce "foreign" as FOR-jin thanks to moving the "g" forward. Interestingly, this also led to me often mispelling words like this based on my mistaken mental pronunciation.

Anyway, I am well aware that English orthography is a dumpster fire, which is why I said "second only to English" in my complaints about French.

P.S. This TvTropes page has a number of words that are commonly mispronounced or pronounced in different ways. After all, if most people pronounce "celtic" with a soft C, who's to say they are wrong? And then there is "oujia" which nobody can agree on how to pronounce. So the silver lining of English is that you can often pronounce things in different ways and still be considered correct.