Why are fictional shows/films so difficult to understand ?

[zenmonkey]

May be related to the language - I have the opposite effect with "Das perfekt Dinner" vs a show.

Different things may be going on - register, dramatization, regional studios registration. Simplified street language vs scripted language.

[sctroyenne]

Reality shows, news, etc tend to follow a formula that you're already very familiar with so you know what to expect while watching which helps you predict to a certain extent what people are going to say. There also tends to be a narrator/announcer who speaks very clearly and is recorded by a studio microphone who explains and sums up everything you're watching along with visuals that correspond directly with what is being talked about.

In fiction the characters can literally be talking about anything. Especially in a lot of French cinema that gets distributed abroad where you may have less plot and action and more scenes that are just long conversations. You may find that some fictional films/TV series might be easier to understand than others. Fast-paced comedy will tend to be the most difficult while a formulaic procedural cop drama may be much easier. Dubbed shows will tend to be the easiest especially since they're recording their voices in a studio and tend to be slowing down to match lip movements.

[smallwhite]

In drama, everything is scripted and actors don't umm and arr or organise their thoughts or search for words. They make concise, to-the-point remarks with no unnecessary or redundant words or umm unneeded words and phrases and arr no redundancy or anything like that or similar and whatnot. Very high content-to-word ratio.

[blaurebell]

I think understanding movies and natives talking among each other is much harder than conversational comprehension. People usually slow down a little when you yourself aren't speaking at lightning speed. A good progression to develop listening comprehension that worked for my Spanish was lots of conversational spanish -> dubbed series -> native series in different accents -> movies -> podcasts with 3-5 people talking over each other. By now I understand Iberian Spanish movies better than my Argentinian husband But then I don't understand audiobooks well because my literary vocabulary is too limited and I get lost with Mexican slang. At some point listening comprehension really becomes a question of vocabulary.

For French I've gone dubbed series -> audiobooks/radio documentaries/podcasts -> native series. With movies I'm still all but I already understand some series quite well and pretty much understand all the French I hear on the street. And since I have a wider vocabulary in French I score better at listening comprehension tests although I still don't understand movies well.

[zenmonkey]

So...if my goal is to become conversational in real life, would you guys recommend dubbed shows and reality TV along with talking to people, above watching fictional shows ?

Material you enjoy. Lots of it. (Krashen n+1, yada yada)
Talking. Shadowing, repeating, self-talk,reading out loud and yes, conversation with people. Output, lots of it.

The *choice* over fictional vs reality doesn't make much difference in my book. Do the time. Should be a little hard. If you find something too hard, put it aside for later.

[sillygoose1]

I think sometimes the way a film is recorded can influence comprehension highly. For example, I could understand a gritty police series like Braquo or Engrenages fine. Or gangster films from the 60s, La French, Braqueuers, etc. I can watch standup and comedy films fine as well. Sometimes movie trailers on Youtube slip me up with a word or a sentence here and there because the dialogue isn't the main focus. But when I watched L.627 which was a police film from the 90s, the only conversations I couldn't really get everything was when scenes were shot in confined rooms. When I turned on the subs because I was confused by me missing so many words all of a sudden the words I was missing out on were extremely basic like "voiture" which made no sense to me. Then I realized the sound quality was pretty bad and there seemed to be an echo when the scene was recorded in dense areas. The copy I had was an early DVD rip + on my laptop.

[Tillumadoguenirurm]

I agree with what I interpreted that smallwhite said, lots of fillers and blah blahs vs lots of important information in a short span of time.

So...if my goal is to become conversational in real life, would you guys recommend dubbed shows and reality TV along with talking to people, above watching fictional shows ?

The *choice* over fictional vs reality doesn't make much difference in my book. Do the time. Should be a little hard. If you find something too hard, put it aside for later.

^ Yup.

It's funny, I find fiction easier because it almost always follows set patterns.

Maybe it just takes longer time to get used to the speed of information in fiction?

[Whodathunkitz]

Thank you for this discussion. I've found it very useful. Apologies if this hijacks the thread a little...

As a result of this I think I'll go back to Spanish history programmes especially any with discussions, either question and answer or better still roundtable discussions (panel of speakers).

Any suggestions?

Especially if freely available eg YouTube with good sound quality.

Context / level
My spanish level is basic, reading best skill, output very little (until October). Readlang says I've read 160000 words or 640 pages. Currently enjoying (yes really!) "Pride and prejudice" in spanish on readlang. 12% read (of 110000 words). Previously hundreds of music videos and lyrics, so some listening. Otherwise my language knowledge is a little bit of an obscure language.

Just a weird thing with the guttenberg book as it's been uploaded to readlang... Lots of missing spaces is actually useful to me. I have to determine if it is "Ella" or "el la" or with common short words eg con "conword" or "con word". Y a or ya etc.

This is closer to listening, where sounds merge.

Possible exercise?
I'm wondering if I should get some Spanish text, remove spaces, punctuation, capitalisation etc and work to format it correctly.

Btw I know that just reading isn't efficient but I'm experimenting! Learning Spanish is interesting to me, but I also want to learn techniques for learning more obscure languages. It's also much easier for me to spend a lot of time on reading compared to many alternatives.

[whatiftheblog]

So...if my goal is to become conversational in real life, would you guys recommend dubbed shows and reality TV along with talking to people, above watching fictional shows ?

Material you enjoy. Lots of it. (Krashen n+1, yada yada)
Talking. Shadowing, repeating, self-talk,reading out loud and yes, conversation with people. Output, lots of it.

Yep, this. However, I would NOT recommend dubbed shows, because to me the material as a whole still isn't "real" French (by francophones for francophones). Instead, I'd suggest watching vlogs, political/social debates, and listening to podcasts. How's your comprehension when it comes to French news-tinted humor shows - Quotidien, Guillaume Meurice / Charline Vanhoenacker, etc? That's usually good (pleasant) training.

[Iversen]

I share some of the same misgivings about political discussions and (some) news programs as LesRonces. If somebody says some rubbish which I know is wrong then I want to skip it, but oldfashioned TV isn't really suited to skipping - and it stills irritate me when politicians and political journalists and .. well, yes, just about anybody .. unhindered by simple decency blabbers on and on with desinformation and empty talk. But in spite of this I do watch ordinary news broadcasts from abroad because that's one of the few niches where people still speak relatively clearly and (mostly) without annoying muusic in the background.

However my extremely low consumption of fictional films and soaps has several reasons, and the tendency to mumble and use fragmented speech in order to make them seem more realistic is only one of them. I'm also quite uninterested in the private squabbles of people (non-existant people in particular), and I think that the amount of evil in the real world is suffient - I can't see any reason to add to that by inventing fictional nastiness.

Personally I think that people who produce films and books about blooody murder and war and fraud and common bickering must be sick in their heads - and it is not an excuse that they 'want to investigate' or 'elucidate' or draw the attention to something in society. They make disgusting things, and I don't want to see disgusting things which don't even exist.