Update: 200 Hours (+ 1 Previously Completed Video Game)I was really busy around the end of last month, so I ended up basically having to skip an update. I've been keeping up with watching French TV. I initially added two more shows to my rotation,
Un dîner presque parfait and
Incroyables Transformations, for a total of four shows. A couple of days ago, I also added
Faites entrer l’accusé, a true crime show.
Un dîner presque parfait-
Un dîner presque parfait is a dinner party themed competition where five different contestants compete to throw the best dinner party. Each day of the week, one of the five contestants serves as the host while the other four serve as the guests. At the end of the episode, the guests rate that day's host on the food/entertainment/decorations/etc.
I've watched three weeks of this so far, and one week was a "seduction special" with an irregular format (five male hosts serving five female guests over the course of the week), so I'm not 100% sure which elements are a fixed part of the show. However, the basic format seems to be roughly to have an introduction of the day's host, a section where the guests read the menu/invitation before actually going to the party, another section where the host prepares for the party, and then the actual party, which includes both dinner and some form of entertainment chosen by the host.
Language-wise, I'm finding it to be the right level of difficulty for where I am right now. Things like the menu section (where the guests not only read but comment on the future menu) would be impossible to follow without some level of food-related vocabulary, which I fortunately do have by now. On the whole, it's pretty easy to determine what is happening in any section of the episode -- it's not hard to figure out that someone is cooking or serving food or whatever -- but all of the actually interesting bits are in the commentary and judgments the guests make about the host of the day and the party itself, giving a strong incentive to work out the details of what people are saying.
- One thing I really like about this show is that they appear to do different weeks in different cities around France. One of the noticeable differences between
Les Reines du Shopping and the German
Shopping Queen is that different weeks of
Shopping Queen are set in different cities, so every week you get to see a group of people in Munich or Berlin or wherever doing their shopping within that specific city.
Les Reines du Shopping just pulls groups of contestants from all over the country in any given week and has them shop in the same section of Paris.
But the format of this show (people holding dinner parties in their own homes) means that it basically requires a group of people from the same area, so choosing contestants from outside of Paris means going to where they live. It's nice to see something from outside of Paris, so I'll probably pick non-Paris episodes whenever they're available.
Incroyables Transformations-
Incroyables Transformations is a makeover show (or "relooking" as it seems to be called in French). The format is pretty standard for a makeover show, if approached a little melodramatically. There are typically two to three makeover recipients per (full length) episode, with each recipient's section following the same basic format. First, the future makeover recipient's friend/family/whoever nominated them comes out and talks a little about the person while describing their terrible clothing choices. Then, the makeover recipient comes out and relays the tale of unrelenting personal tragedy that led to the terrible clothing choices. This could be anything from "I had two young kids and stopped having time for stuff like that" to "I was in a horrifying accident that required long term hospitalization and major reconstructive surgery on my entire body."
After the intro, the person leaves and we get a description from each expert (clothes, makeup, and hair) of the transformation they're going to make, followed by a reveal of the makeover recipient to the person who brought them in (and to themselves in a mirror).
The difficulty level of this show varies pretty wildly for me even within one episode, though I haven't run into anything totally out of my general range of understanding. The introduction section where the person tells their story is the hardest part for me, and my understanding level depends a lot on the nature of the person's story. Sometimes I understand the whole thing almost entirely, sometimes only the bare bones of what they're talking about. Weirdly, the overdramatic nature of the presentation is a pretty strong motivator to pay attention -- if I missed some really "shocking" statement someone made, the reactions of the hosts/experts will make it totally clear.
The section of the show with the actual makeover is by far the easiest. I understand it almost as well as I understand an average episode of
Les Reines du Shopping. The vocabulary is very similar and everything is shown on screen while they're describing it.
This means that I spend each episode alternating between high and low difficulty, which is interesting. I'll have a sort of ten minute period where I have to put a lot of effort into understanding, followed by a little break with significantly easier content, and then back to the hard stuff again and so on.
- For whatever reason, the makeover portion is typically framed as a series of flash-forwards during a discussion that experts are all holding with each other immediately after talking with the person who is going to receive the makeover. Right after the person has left the room, they'll start talking about what they intend to do during the makeover, like "I'm going to start with an attractive dress, and then I'm going to add a pair of leather boots..." and "She's going to want..." and so on. After a couple of sentences into each expert's monologue, the audio is cut over scenes of the actual makevoer happening, but the description format remains the same.
So, I already had a basic awareness of how future intentions are described in French, but watching these sequences was enough to actually burn it into my brain. After viewing a dozen odd episodes, I can now say that I have heard variations of the phrase "I'm going to apply" roughly 900 million times and probably couldn't
not comprehend it even if I wanted to.
- While I naturally got a lot of the vocab needed for this show from
Les Reines du Shopping, the initial interview portion has me relying more on stuff I learned from
The ABC Murders. A lot of the language used by Poirot to get in depth information about people's backstories, life events, and opinions are apparently used to talk about these things in general (not just by detectives questioning witnesses).
- The only thing that really bothers me about the show is that a few episodes have featured the use of permanent(!!!) makeup. I'm not totally down with people appearing on a reality shows having things done permanently to their bodies. The specific instances so far have been things like covering up a scar from an accident or giving eyebrows to a woman who'd overplucked hers to the point she no longer had any. If they get into much more than this, though, I might stop watching for non-language-related reasons.
Faites entrer l'accusé- This is a late addition to the line up, and one that happened pretty much because I was getting bored. I really wanted to watch something that wasn't about fashion or food for a change, and true crime seemed like something I might be able to manage if I could find something with French subtitles.
After a bit of poking around on youtube, I was able to find the official/verified channel for
Faites entrer l'accusé, a French true crime series that's been airing for almost 20 years. They started uploading some of their back catalog to youtube in May of last year and are up to ~87 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrjIfq ... FFg/videosImportantly, they all seem to have ASR (machine-transcribed) subs enabled, which is not as good as real subs, but much better than nothing. The most common errors tend to be proper names transcribed as similar-sounding normal words, but you also get stuff like "deux hommes" being transcribed as "deux zones" etc. Stuttered or mispoken sentences often become total nonsense.
Some of the stuff said in this show gets pretty elaborate, though, and I'd be pretty lost without the subs to help. Sometimes I've had to pause the show and reread/replay a sentence a couple of times when it seemed like I was at risk of missing something truly essential.
- Language-wise, I'd say this is much more complex than anything I've previously watched by far. Like in *ABC Murders*, there are a lot of complex, time-related sentences (e.g. "In 1999, the victim had been living away from her husband for three years, but they had not yet officially divorced.")
In general, most of the things being talked about happened in the past, which is not true of most of the other shows I've been watching. The intro section of
Incroyables Transformations probably comes the closest to providing anything similar. This is an area of the language I need way more practice in than I'm currently getting.
- The only major problem with this show is that the episodes range from 1h 10m to 1h 50m long, which is waaaay longer than I want to commit to on an average day. I may end up picking longer episodes and splitting them between two days. I'm going to spread this one out between episodes of other things and only do one at a time. It's a lot harder and requires more effort than anything else I'm currently doing.
General- I've finally adapted to the French use of centiliters. I'm American, so I'm largely familiar with cups, ounces, and sometimes grams when it comes to cooking. In the rare occasions I've dealt with liquid measurements in metric, it's always been in ml. So while I could have easily translated something like "50cl" from French to English in a literal sense from the get-go, I didn't have any instinctive sense of what size that actually referred to. I'd have to mentally translate 50cl into 500ml and then remember that 500ml is about two cups. No longer! I've heard the common amounts often enough that I instinctively know that 50cl is approximately two cups, 25cl is about a cup, and so on.
- After adding more difficult shows,
Les Reines du Shopping feels like even more of a breeze when I finally get to it. It's a nice break. With a couple of weeks between viewings, the increase in the complexity of the grammar I've absorbed is much more obvious. Since I understand the show in general, it feels more like the show gains a bunch of new details rather than that I understand it better. (For example, it isn't really necessary to distinguish between "I'm looking for leopard print boots" and "I'm going to look for leopard print boots" to understand what's going on, but sentences suddenly feel a lot more detailed and varied when you're actually automatically making that distinction.)
- Between starting on an audiobook or a game, I've decided on doing the audiobook. I've been trying to find some kind of subtitle file or captioned youtube video for the librivox recording of
Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur that actually pairs the text of the book with the audio automatically, but it looks like no one has made such a thing yet. So I'm going to try making one myself. I was able to generate a blank subtitle file with what are hopefully the right line times using periods of silence in the audio as dividers. I'll just use my subtitle editor as an audio player and copy & paste the text to each line as I go through it.
Since the book is a collection of short stories, I can try it out with just the first story (~30m of audio) to see if it's ultimately worth continuing.
The current plan is to keep up with the current set of shows while figuring out a plan for the audiobook. I might update specifically on the audiobook depending on what I end up doing there. If I end up making subtitles for the entire book, I'll probably put them somewhere for other people to use for stuff.