Learning French in Japan

[katsu]

It's been a while, so a brief update. I'm still using FSI drills (on unit 17 now) and watching the French dub of The Good Wife every day. I'll be finishing the series in a few days, after which I'll do a post on how much my listening has improved through this exercise.

Also, a few notes on native French content I've watched, all with subtitles (either French or Japanese):

Falco (DVD)
A series about a cop who is shot in 1990 and wakes up from his coma 22 years later. It's kind of a fish-out-of-water story, as he tries to return to his job but doesn't know anything about the internet, smartphones, etc. Other than that it's a fairly standard case-of-the-week policier, cheesy but fun. The French is pretty easy, although there's a fair amount of slang.

Glacé (DVD)
Another policier, this time with Julia Piaton as a small-town cop investigating a bizarre horse mutilation which turns out to be connected to a serial killer serving time in a nearby mental institution. This didn't work for me at all. Good actors trapped in bad writing. At least I got the DVDs for only 6 euros.

L'Empereur de Paris (DVD)
Vincent Cassel as the real-life figure Eugène-François Vidocq, a criminal turned crime-fighter in early nineteenth-century Paris. Visually--sets, costumes, cinematography--this movie was spectacular, but the story was pretty blah, a simplistic battle versus a generic bad guy that felt lifted from a superhero movie. The actual Vidocq is a fascinating figure who deserved better than this. Apparently there's an older movie with Gérard Depardieu that I've heard good things about, so maybe I'll check that out.

La Lutte des Classes (DVD)
A wonderful slice-of-life movie about a young couple (Leïla Bekhti and Edouard Baer) who move to the suburbs of Paris with their kids. They're torn between their liberal principles, which compel them to put their son in the local public school, and the fact the school is (sometimes literally) falling apart. Lots of commentary on race and class, while being funny throughout. One warning: the spoken French is very fast; I wouldn't have had a chance to follow this without the subtitles.

Une nouvelle amie (DVD)
Romain Duris and Anaïs Demoustier in a story of the relationship between a woman and the husband of her recently-deceased best friend. I liked this a lot--the story went to some unexpected places and all of the characters felt like fully-realized, complex individuals. Fans of Netflix's Plan Coeur, keep an eye out for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Zita Hanrot as a waitress.
If you like this, some of director François Ozon's other films are available on streaming services: Jeune et Jolie is on Netflix, and Dans la maison is on Amazon Prime. But I thought Une nouvelle amie was better than either of them.

Celle Que Vous Croyez (theater)
Juliette Binoche as a divorced professor who invents a 20-something online profile for herself and ends up catfishing a much younger man. Great movie, and a moving performance from Binoche. I thought the movie lost its way a bit near the end, but still worth seeing.

Doubles vies (theater)
I usually like Olivier Assayas's movies, but this story of middle-aged intellectuals cheating on their spouses with each other left me cold. It's set in the publishing industry, and there are lots of scenes of the characters sitting around discussing the future of books, but no one had anything interesting to say.

[katsu]

I finished all seven seasons of The Good Wife (with the French dub) a few days ago, so here is an update about how my first foray into non-subtitled French content went. Since I started this, I watched at least one episode (sometimes two or three) every single day. This represented 115 hours of listening, and adding to that a few other things I watched, I estimate I've listened to about 150 hours in all.

After finishing the series, I went back and rewatched a couple of episodes from the first season to see if I could tell how much my listening comprehension improved. The difference is quite obvious. There was one first season episode in particular where on first viewing I couldn't understand what the legal case was about and thus couldn't really follow the story, but now I can. As I said in an earlier post, when I started there were entire scenes that were gibberish to me, but now I can understand at least something in every scene. Of course, I should stress that I haven't magically acquired native-like listening abilities after only 150 hours. Watching shows, even dubbed ones, is still difficult enough to be frustrating. And listening to actual native content feels like a whole order of magnitude harder. But with this experiment I've proven to myself that this strategy is a good one and worth continuing. More importantly, it's fun and doesn't feel like studying.

As a replacement show, I've started on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I've seen most of these, but many years ago so the details are fuzzy. Aside from the technobabble (which is largely impenetrable even in English), the French is pretty straightforward, and it's fun to hear Picard's name pronounced correctly. Netflix has all of the Star Trek series with French audio, so I if I don't get sick of it this should keep me busy for quite a while. As Captain Picard would say, «En avant toute, distorsion 6!»

[katsu]

I've had a bit of a breakthrough in my French listening. My current practice is to watch shows dubbed into French with no subtitles (since the speech is generally clearer), but shows originally in French with French subtitles. So I was watching the reality show The Circle the other day with subs, and I decided to turn them off. Wonder of wonders, I could still understand pretty much everything! A word missed here and there, but I had no problem following the story. This is the first time I've ever been able to do this, and it felt like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. I was able to watch the rest of the episodes without any subs.

In order to test out my newly-acquired superpower, I tried watching the first episode of Plan Coeur, and I could (mostly) understand this, too! Of course, I've watched this twice before (don't judge me), so that probably helped. So then I put on the Fary stand-up comedy special, which I hadn't seen, and I could get more than half of the jokes. Still a long way to go, but I feel like I've turned a corner.

I'm still watching the French dub of Star Trek: The Next Generation (now in season 4), and will keep doing this while also watching as much original French content as I can get my hands on. Amazon France has stopped shipping overseas, cutting off my major supply line for DVDs, meaning I'll be focusing on Netflix and Amazon Prime for the foreseeable future. Or I may simply start re-watching some of my French DVDs, this time with the subtitles off.

I've also been trying to read at least a few pages of French a day. I've just started Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, which will be my first book for the Super Challenge--I'm reading it while listening to the LibriVox audiobook. Before this I made an attempt at Madame Bovary, but the vocabulary was beyond me. I'll have to come back to it later.

In other news, I dropped Ancient Greek just a few weeks after I started it, but I've started Italian. Currently I'm just doing Pimsleur 1 (I must have gotten this a long time ago, because the dialogues talk about lira and not euros) and a bit of Duolingo every day. My main focus is still French, so I'm giving myself permission to drop Italian if I lose interest.

[katsu]

Eleven days into the super challenge, and here's what I've watched so far:

Into the night (Netflix, 6 eps)
Star Trek TNG (Netflix, 5 eps)
Les héritiers (Amazon Prime)
Seuls (TV)
La loi de Pauline (Amazon Prime)
Le Grimoire d'Arkandias (Amazon Prime)
Diane a les épaules (Film Festival)
(this last movie, which I recommend, can be seen, together with a bunch of other films at http://www.myfrenchfilmfestival.com)

This is 16 hours, so about 10% of the SC total. At this rate, I'll finish the challenge in a few months, so I'm thinking of ways to make it more, well, challenging. I may double the total of movies, or maybe I'll stop counting TV series. To be honest I'm not sure why I'm bothering with this, since I don't need any motivation to watch French content.

Where I do need motivation is in the reading part of the challenge. Partly because reading is more tiring than watching TV, and partly because finding a book at the right level is not always easy (my shelf is full of barely-read books that turned out to be too hard). I'm almost finished with Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, which is at about the right level for me but which is... not exactly a great book. I was thinking about reading Les Trois Mousquetaires next, but I've been having trouble finding a paper copy, which I prefer to digital. I think I'll probably pick up Madame Bovary again, which is full of words I don't know, but it's just such a great novel.

[DaveAgain]

Where I do need motivation is in the reading part of the challenge. Partly because reading is more tiring than watching TV, and partly because finding a book at the right level is not always easy (my shelf is full of barely-read books that turned out to be too hard). I'm almost finished with Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, which is at about the right level for me but which is... not exactly a great book. I was thinking about reading Les Trois Mousquetaires next, but I've been having trouble finding a paper copy, which I prefer to digital. I think I'll probably pick up Madame Bovary again, which is full of words I don't know, but it's just such a great novel.

BNF.fr have a collection of 75 out of copyright books french school children read at some point. You could perhaps sample some of those until you find one that you both like and feel is at the right level for you.

[katsu]

BNF.fr have a collection of 75 out of copyright books french school children read at some point. You could perhaps sample some of those until you find one that you both like and feel is at the right level for you.

Thanks, that's a real treasure trove! I like that a lot of the books include the original illustrations.

[katsu]

Here's what I've watched since the last update:

Star Trek TNG (6 episodes)

Tirez la langue, mademoiselle
A sweet romcom with Louise Bourgoin in a love triangle with two brothers.

Gaspard va au mariage
A guy has to go to his father's wedding, and convinces a woman he just met to pretend to be his girlfriend. Liked this a lot.

Tristesse Club
Two brothers learn of their estranged father's death, and end up involved with a woman who claims to be their sister. Liked this too--it had an indie-film quirkiness, anchored with characters that felt genuine.

Dérapages (6 episodes)
I loved Eric Cantona's performance in this Netflix series, but wasn't a fan of the writing. The twists and turns all felt forced and artificial rather than organic.

L'Art du Crime (6 episodes)
A completely hokey series about a tough-as-nails cop who teams up with an art historian to solve art-related crimes. Cheesy but fun, and the French is relatively easy to follow.

La volante
Disappointingly predictable psychological thriller with a solid central performance from Nathalie Baye. Available on Amazon Prime.

Maman a tort (2 episodes)
An intriguing show about a school psychologist who suspects that a young boy who refers to having two mothers might have been kidnapped. I saw the first episode of this on a flight to France once, and eventually tracked down the DVD. There are no subtitles at all, however, making it pretty tough going for me. There are entire scenes where I can't understand anything, but I'm going to stick with it because I want to see how it turns out. Also, confusingly, there is a movie with the exact same title but a completely unrelated story.

Je ne suis pas un salaud
Nicolas Duvauchelle gives a riveting performance as a man who is slowly unravelling as he loses his place in society. In some ways this is like a well-written version of Dérapages, with a much more realistic ending.

Les Gazelles
Romantic comedy about a woman who leaves a long-term relationship to look for something more exciting. Watched this without subtitles and honestly could only follow about 10~20% of the dialogue. Comedies in general can be bad news for language learners, since everyone talks so fast. Movies and shows where everyone is depressed (I'm looking at you, Les Revenants) are much more learner-friendly.

I'm also continuing to read a bit every day, usually while listening to the audiobook. After finishing Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, I read Petit Nicolas as a kind of palate cleanser, and am now a few chapters into Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.

I'm also keeping up, barely, with Italian. I finished Pimsleur 1 and dropped Duolingo, but have started Clozemaster. I'm also watching an Italian cop show, Carlo and Malik, using the "Language learning with Netflix" extension to display Italian and French subtitles simultaneously. It really is amazing how much Italian you can understand once you know French. I'm not in any hurry to learn Italian, so I'm just doing 15-30 minutes a day.

[DaveAgain]

Maman a tort (2 episodes)
An intriguing show about a school psychologist who suspects that a young boy who refers to having two mothers might have been kidnapped. I saw the first episode of this on a flight to France once, and eventually tracked down the DVD. There are no subtitles at all, however, making it pretty tough going for me. There are entire scenes where I can't understand anything, but I'm going to stick with it because I want to see how it turns out. Also, confusingly, there is a movie with the exact same title but a completely unrelated story.

There's also a book.

[katsu]

French reading update:

I mentioned I was reading Monte Cristo in my last post, but I lost interest and gave up after 10 chapters. I ended up switching back to Madame Bovary, which I just finished yesterday.

The vocabulary was too much for me, so I decided to use my own version version of the L-R method: I would listen to the audiobook while reading an English translation of one chapter, then go back and read the same chapter in French, while listening to the audio again. There are two versions of the audiobook on Librivox, so I listened to a different recording each time (I highly recommend the one read by Victoria).

I loved the book, so I'll probably continue with more Flaubert at some point, but for the time being I'm doing something a bit easier: Jules Verne's Deux Ans de Vacances, a little-talked-about novel about a group of schoolboys shipwrecked on a desert island. I only chose this because I happened to find a used copy of it on Yahoo auctions, but it's not bad so far, and I can follow it (though sometimes just barely) without using English as a crutch.

[DaveAgain]

I loved the book, so I'll probably continue with more Flaubert at some point,

I abandoned Mme Bovary ~page 100 because I found it too depressing. Why is everyone but me so wrong about this book!