French via shopping-themed reality television

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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby IronMike » Sun Feb 28, 2021 7:27 am

improbablediscussion wrote:Dialang results

I took the Dialang listening test yesterday, and then I went ahead and took the reading test as well, just for the hell of it. I got a B1 on both of them, but I think both those scores are each overinflated by roughly a level, for different reasons.

Have you tried DLI's version? I found, at least for Russian, it is pretty accurate.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Mon Mar 01, 2021 6:41 am

IronMike wrote:Have you tried DLI's version? I found, at least for Russian, it is pretty accurate.


I might well try the listening portion the next time I have a couple of hours free to sit down and do it. I feel like I'd end up with similar results on any reading test, though, assuming there isn't a time limit.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Mon Mar 01, 2021 7:07 am

Rewatch results

I rewatched the first episode I ever watched and unsurprisingly understood a lot more. During the first watch, I wasn't even at the point where I could necessarily hear obvious cognates that I'd be able to notice five episodes later. It was interesting to see exactly how much flew by me the first time around, though.

- It turns out that the contestant of the episode was shopping on her birthday. There was a moment in the episode where she sings a bit of "Happy Birthday" (in English) and I think I briefly wondered if it was her birthday at that moment the first time around, but that was all the thought I gave to it.

This time, I could see the birthday thing just running through the entire episode. She initially says it's her birthday in the car just before the shopping starts. The other contestants each comment on the fact that it's her birthday and wish her a happy birthday. They also occasionally bring it up when making comments on the outfits she chooses. When she wins extra money and extra time later in the episode, they all say variations of "Wow! Happy Birthday!" instead of the usual congratulations.

So, yeah. I basically missed all of this completely the first time around.

- I used to not understand much of anything from the first few minutes of most episodes, because it's the section with the least reference to anything visible on screen. The contestants are just sort of together and doing introductions and such. The first time I watched this episode, I understood basically nothing from this short section aside aside from "bonjour". But this time I could basically understand what they were talking about, the announcer's descriptions of them, and their comments on their initial impressions of each other.

- I remember not understanding anything from the announcement of what the challenge was the first time around. I was only able to figure out that the challenge was either sunglasses or at least related to sunglasses when Cristina put on a pair of sunglasses after announcing the challenge. This was confirmed when the contestant went to buy sunglasses before anything else.

This time, I could understand the entire announcement, including how much time they had, how much money they were getting, the fact that the challenge was sunglasses, the fact that they needed to buy an outfit, shoes, a bag, and jewelry along with the sunglasses. And of course, the fact that at the end of the week a winner would be chosen and receive 1000 euros.

The announcement takes basically the same form every week, so at this point I can understand the entire thing even when it's varied. However, it took me a long time to get to this point. For about the first half of the time I was doing this, I wasn't sure if contestants were specifically required by the rules of the competition to buy a purse and jewelry, or if they were just always choosing that as their accessories. I also wasn't totally sure how much money the winner got or even if they were getting money at all. (On German Shopping Queen, Guido just straight up hands the winner a bunch of cash on screen in the final episode of the week, but on Les Reines du Shopping Cristina just says the winner is getting 1000 euros. The fact that this is a competition for an actual cash prize is highly emphasized in the German version and almost actively de-emphasized in the French.)

- I was largely able to figure out basically whether the commentary was positive or negative the first time around, but I obviously didn't understand much of what specifically was being said. I definitely didn't realize exactly how strongly Cristina was praising this particular contestant. I remember having no particular idea how she'd score the contestants at the end of the week and being surprised when this contestant got such a high score from her relative to everyone else. However, this time around it's pretty clear that Cristina thought she did especially well, even with the criticisms she did have. It's obvious that this contestant is the main contender for the win, short of someone else doing amazingly well on their day.

- The criticism itself was obviously much more understandable this time around. This early on, I could only understand really strong, basic, emphatic criticisms. But this time, I could understand that Cristina was saying the contestant would have been better off choosing a large ring instead of a bracelet as her jewelry, because the bracelet ended up not really being a visible part of the outfit (because it was positioned under the sleeve of her jacket). And that she didn't think black sunglasses looked right on her, though the sunglasses themselves were fashionable.

- In the initial watch, I distinctly remember one of the contestants constantly making fun of the contestant of the day's love of stripes by comparing her clothes to Beetlejuice. However, I didn't catch the fact that the other contestants and Cristina also talked about the stripes at various points.

- There were some new places where I understood new words almost entirely via visual context, like one of the contestants comparing a pair of earrings to Christmas ornaments. They feel like things that could have potentially been understandable without any French knowledge, but I guess I just had too much to pay attention to overall to notice them the first time around.

Looking back on this episode, I'm a little amazed that I was able to get anywhere missing so much of what was being said. I'm glad to have stuck with it, though.

I'm probably going to stick to the update schedule I've set, though my progress may well slow a lot now that I've absorbed the basics. At the beginning of this it felt like my understanding was basically doubling with every week's worth of episodes.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:20 am

Update: 125 Hours + half a video game

I've hit 125 hours and I'm about halfway through the ABC Murders, so it's time for another update. I'll divide this one into two parts.

The video game and misc learning

- Between the proficiency test and the part of the video game I've gotten through, I've been able to learn the spellings of basically all the words/phrases I've been wondering about. I've also gotten to see the written forms of things I know only the spoken form of. There are a lot of candidates for most surprising written form between the two groups, but I think "a-t-elle" and "a-t-il" combinedly win the competition for "written form I would never have been able to come up with on my own".

Also, it turns out that a lot of the words/phrases I've been confused about actually are in fact contractions of some form or another. I've been a little concerned about my inability to tell where words begin and end, but I'm not as fussed about it now that I know how many French words actually are contractions.

- Most of the stuff I've been wondering about did turn out to be stuff that was both common and functional. Mostly words and phrases that appear all over the place but aren't particularly notable or interesting. However, there was one thing that I'd been wondering about that did turn out to be kind of funny.

I learned the word "allez" pretty early on, via contestants encouraging each other to go faster, but I didn't know exactly what it meant. Later on, I was able to determine that it meant "go" through hearing it used in other contexts.

However, in the period where I was starting to pick up non-cognate verbs, I learned what seemed like another word for "go"! Sometimes contestants would use "vais" to describe also describe going. After picking up on "vais", I started hearing some some other variations that seemed to be the same verb in different conjugations ("va"), also seeming to refer to going places.

So, I spent the last block of my 100 hours wondering: what actually is the difference between these two verbs? Are they just really similar words that mean almost the same thing (like "big" and "large")? Or does one of them actually mean something more specific than "go" that I just haven't picked up on?

Yeah, no, LOL. As any French speakers/learners reading this know, they're both forms of the same really, really irregular verb ("aller"). I just didn't notice because I wasn't looking for verbs that irregular (outside of "to be" and "to have", which somehow didn't strike me as weird to be that way). I'm kind of curious as to how long it would have taken me to figure it out without being told, but it's probably for the best that I just looked it up.

- Weirdly, I'd already been hearing this verb used outside of the specific context of going places, as an auxiliary verb, but somehow didn't connect the two different usages as being the same word either. Like, the "va"s I was hearing that weren't about going somewhere just didn't link up with the "va"s that were about literal going.

I also learned the phrase "ça va" really, really early on (like, possibly within the first episode early) and until I saw it written, I'd been thinking of it as a single word/concept in it's own right.

- In spite of these misunderstandings (or incomplete understandings?), seeing the complete table of conjugations for the verb "aller" has really only made me more inclined to not attempt to actively learn the entire thing. Ditto for "avoir". I'm good with continuing to pick up different forms as I go.

- Initially, this also made me inclined to just sort of continue ignoring anything about the various tenses of verbs and auxiliary verbs used in French, because it looked... involved. So, I decided to just sort of leave it until whenever I started noticing that sort of thing.

However, that turned out to be almost immediately as soon as I started playing the ABC Murders. There's a lot of discussion of things like alibis, times of death, and what people are going to do in response to events that have just happened. Part of the gameplay involves periodically using Poirot's "little grey cells", where the game will ask a question about the crime (e.g. "What time was the victim killed?") and then the player picks which statements provide clues to the answer (e.g. "The witness discovered the body at 11:00.") I'm finding that these kinds of details are more noticeable when rereading sentences a few times to work out what reasoning the game wants.

So I actually am starting to hear/see the actual grammar for past vs present vs future, as opposed to just sort of ignoring auxiliary verbs and verb tenses and determining the time frame via context. My actual knowledge of how it works is still very vague and inconsistent, though. I've definitely seen several different ways of saying something happened in the past and I couldn't tell you what determined which one was used in each case.

- The game itself is turning out to be pretty doable at my level, though I don't think that would be the case if I hadn't previously played it in English. As it is, I have just enough context for everything to make it possible to figure out most of what's being said. Vocabulary-wise, I'm mostly learning murder/crime terminology, as well as different ways of expressing feelings and intentions, though there's also a fair amount of discussions around work, business, and scheduling (dates and times).

TV

- I've been alternating between watching five episodes of Les Reines du Shopping and then five episodes of other stuff. I tried out three other shows: Objectif Top Chef, Cauchemar en cuisine avec Philippe Etchebest, and Tous en cuisine en direct avec Cyril Lignac.

- Objectif Top Chef is a show where apprentice cooks compete to have a spot on Top Chef proper. Specifically, they're competing to be a part of Philippe Etchebest's brigade on Top Chef. I still don't really know what that actually means, because our Top Chef doesn't have brigades or anything similar.

Anyway, Objectif Top Chef is definitely above Les Reines du Shopping in terms of difficulty. There are extended portions of the show where you really need to understand what people are saying at least somewhat in order to even understand what's going on. Also, the competition rules are more complicated, and what happens in later rounds can change based on how people did in previous rounds. Information like how much time the contestants have left isn't printed on screen, only shouted at the contestants by the host, so you do have to know that stuff already.

Oddly, discussion of the competition rules was some of the most clear and understandable dialogue to me, largely because the actual vocabulary had a strong overlap with things I already know from Les Reines du Shopping. Generic praise and criticism also makes up a pretty large portion of the show's content. It ended up working out in a way where the sections with the lowest amount of context use the largest amount of vocabulary I'm familiar with, making the show basically comprehensible throughout.

I gave it a week to hook me, but even though I had enough understanding to potentially continue, I just found the show overall too boring. It wasn't really focused that much on the actual cooking process, though there were a couple of sections in the show that demonstrated cooking techniques for the audience or went in depth on an ingredient. Too much of the show was dedicated to what I've always considered the most boring parts of reality competition shows (like lingering shots of Philippe Etchebest sitting there looking very stern to make the contestant think they must have completely failed the task).

- Cauchemar en cuisine avec Philippe Etchebest is basically French Kitchen Nightmares. It's hosted by the same guy from Objectif Top Chef, who acts as our French Gordon Ramsey. I only watched one episode, largely because episodes are one and a half hours long instead of the 50 minutes I've gotten used to making time for.

I'd definitely say it's harder than Objectif Top Chef, at least for me. However, it's also more engaging. The episode I watched didn't have an insane level of drama in it -- nothing compared to what I think of as the most memorable episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, anyway -- but it had enough going on to keep my attention even through parts I couldn't totally follow.

I may watch more of this one every once in a while, but the lengthy run time means it won't be a regular choice. I kind of wish they'd just cut the episodes down to 50 minutes -- it felt like there was a fair amount of filler that could have been removed. I don't think most terrible restaurants have enough interesting problems to warrant a full hour and a half.

- Tous en cuisine en direct avec Cyril Lignac is an obvious product of last year's lockdowns. The basic premise of the show is that Cyril cooks a basic meal in real time in his kitchen, while five other people/families follow along and cook the same thing in their own kitchens via webcam. So, all of the meals are simple, usually two recipes, and they're all explicitly meant to be cooked in less than 45 minutes.

This show is great, especially for my purposes! I'd say it's about a similar difficulty level to Les Reines du Shopping overall. After the introductions are done, virtually the entire rest of the show is dedicated to Cyril demonstrating the recipe(s) while trying wrangle five different groups of people via webcam, including his co-host, who generally spends the episode mildly trolling him.

The end result of this is that you end up hearing instructions repeated a lot. He'll always say whatever it is he's doing while he's shown doing it ("First, I add the sugar..."). After every few steps, he'll check if everyone else is following along. He'll ask what they're doing or how far they've gotten. If people have problems, they'll ask questions. Sometimes people don't have the exact ingredients in the recipe and ask if they can use some other thing instead. Sometimes Cyril will look at what they're doing and give more instructions or tell them to change what they're doing somehow.

The ingredients for the recipes are printed on screen when he first goes through them, pointing to each ingredient on the table as he lists them off. The other instructions (including time in the oven) aren't printed at all, though. So if you wanted to actually make the recipe yourself, you would at least need to understand enough to pick up the temperature & cooking time from hearing it spoken (or be willing to go get it from show's website). In general, though, everything else about the cooking process is basically followable just from paying attention to what's going on.

My main reason for wanting to add a cooking show was to learn vocabulary relating to food and cooking, and this show makes it really easy to pick up. So, I figure I'll continue with this one until I understand it at least as well as I understand Les Reines du Shopping. I don't actually expect this to take nearly as long -- I feel like I'm about where I was at 40-50 hours of Les Reines du Shopping right here at the start. I'm definitely absorbing unknown (but contextually obvious) vocabulary at a much faster rate than I was when I just started out.

My current plan is to largely continue as I have been. I'll be alternating Les Reines du Shopping with Tous en cuisine, while also working on finishing up the ABC Murders whenever I have extra time.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Sat May 01, 2021 4:52 am

Update: 150 Hours + a video game

- I've finished the ABC Murders. I almost wish the game had been a little longer. I would have liked more time seeing some of the things I've been learning. The game is strangely well-suited for language practice. I'm considering replaying the game Syberia in French next, but it's been several years since I've played that game and I'm not sure I'm up to it just yet. I remember that game having some serious examples of "adventure game logic" in it that I'm not sure I want to deal with while trying to play a game in French.

I'm also considering trying to read the first Arsène Lupin book while listening along with the audiobook from LibriVox. I did learn a lot of crime-related words from playing the ABC Murders, so I might actually be up to it.

Whatever I decide on, I'm definitely going to find some activity that combines text + audio the way a video game does. It's been extremely helpful in pushing me to pay attention to areas of the language that I've been ignoring while doing pure listening/watching.

- I've started hearing some of the things I've been learning from the ABC Murders while watching TV shows. There seems to be an unavoidable lag between understanding something when reading and being able to understand it when just listening, even when the reading itself is combined with listening. I've stopped ignoring the various forms of "aller" when they're used as auxilliary verbs, though. I also ended up learning a lot of verbs related to thinking/knowing/believing things, and I'm hearing those more often now, too.

- For some reason, I've suddenly started seeing ads in the ad breaks during episodes. Previously, I'd only actually seen ads a handful of times, and I figured it was because they didn't have a lot of companies who wanted to advertise to people in the US. But since a couple of weeks ago, I've suddenly been getting ads in all the ad breaks. Mostly for Amazon, which makes sense, but also for Call of Duty, which would make more sense if I didn't get those particular ads exclusively during Les Reines du Shopping and not Tous en Cuisine. I mean, I can understand targeting any random viewer in the US with your Call of Duty ad, but narrowing it down specifically to viewers of Les Reines du Shopping seems... odd, as a targeting strategy.

- Tous en cuisine continues to go well. I'd say that I understand basically all of the vocabulary for ingredients that feature in basically every episode (e.g. flour, water, eggs, salt, etc.) as well as a good chunk of other frequently used ingredients (ham, raspberries, etc.) I have a pretty good handle on most of the cooking tools/utensils and the verbs that commonly go with them.

- I thought I already knew the word for potatoes before starting the show, because it turns out that French people also like to refer to ugly, boxy clothing as being like a "sack of potatoes". So, I'd been assuming that potatoes were "patates". However, on Tous en cuisine, they only ever call potatoes "pommes de terre". Maybe it's a "patate" when it's in a sack and a "pomme de terre" everywhere else. Whatever it is, I technically know two words for "potato" now.

- I haven't actually watched all that many cooking shows in German, so while I know pretty wide variety of food and cooking terms from other sources, I feel like I might actually end up with a wider cooking vocabulary in French. I've already had to look up the German word for "immersion blender" after learning the French version, because I realized I had no idea what they were called in German and it felt bizarre.

- I'm not 100% sure, but I think Cyril Lignac has an accent. The way he says the word "15" was the first thing that really caught my attention. To me, it sounds like he's using a vowel more like that in the English word "ten" than the usual vowel most French speakers use in that word. It sounds different enough that it initially used to take me a moment to register exactly what word he'd even said. (A bit like if someone had an accent that made them pronounce "fifteen" as "feftin" or something. Not that hard to figure out in context, but different enough to disrupt the flow of understanding if you're not used to hearing it said that way.)

After actively paying attention to how he says other words, I can now also say that he pronounces "5" and "50" the same way, though for some reason it doesn't register as noticeably to me as his "15" does. I've been comparing his speech and pronunciation of other words to his cohost Jérôme's a bit, but it's hard to work out what's an accent difference vs an age/personality/style difference.

His Wikipedia page says he's from the South of France, though, so it would make sense if he did have an accent different from what I'm used to hearing.

- I've decided to add another show to the rotation, though I haven't decided on exactly what to add. Lately, I've really been feeling that Les Reines du Shopping has gotten too easy for me. It's not that I understand everything that's ever said (far from it), but I do understand enough that I'm not really compelled to figure out more. I can just sort of coast through an average episode understanding the majority of what's being said without feeling like I'm really missing anything important. When watching Tous en cuisine or playing ABC Murders, I've constantly had new words, phrases, grammar, etc coming to my attention and making me think about what I'm hearing. That's not happening so much with Les Reines du Shopping anymore. Everything new that I'm hearing on Les Reines du Shopping lately has been something that I noticed in Tous en cuisine or ABC Murders first.

I do still find it useful as a measure of what I'm learning, though. Every time I come back to it after a week of watching something else, I really notice how my understanding has grown in even that short time. So, I'm not going to totally eliminate it from the lineup. I'm just going to make the breaks between groups of episodes a little longer. Instead of just alternating between five days of Les Reines du Shopping and five days of Tous en cuisine, I'm going to throw another show in there as well. (I'd double up on Tous en cuisine, but there actually aren't that many episodes in total available to watch, and I don't want to run out of them too quickly.)

What other show will I add? I'll have to see. I have a few shows that look interesting in mind already. I'm going to stick to fashion, shopping, and cooking as main topics for the moment, though.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby Maiwenn » Sat May 01, 2021 8:45 am

improbablediscussion wrote:What other show will I add? I'll have to see. I have a few shows that look interesting in mind already. I'm going to stick to fashion, shopping, and cooking as main topics for the moment, though.


If you can find access to them, I think you'd probably enjoy "Un dîner presque parfait" and "Bienvenue chez nous". They are both of a similar format to Les reines du shopping. The first features four people taking turns preparing a meal for the other three. They then judge the meals on the food, ambiance, decoration, etc. The second instead features bed and breakfasts. There's also "4 mariages pour une lune de miel" which is about weddings. Un dîner presque parfait now has new episodes for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The other two do not.

ETA: I have really enjoyed reading about your process and progress! :)

Oh! There is also le meilleur pâtissier which is a French remake of the Great British Bakeoff.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Sat May 01, 2021 9:44 pm

Maiwenn wrote:If you can find access to them, I think you'd probably enjoy "Un dîner presque parfait" and "Bienvenue chez nous". They are both of a similar format to Les reines du shopping. The first features four people taking turns preparing a meal for the other three. They then judge the meals on the food, ambiance, decoration, etc. The second instead features bed and breakfasts. There's also "4 mariages pour une lune de miel" which is about weddings. Un dîner presque parfait now has new episodes for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The other two do not.


I'm definitely going to try Un dîner presque parfait. The theme and five-day format are right up my alley, and there are a couple of weeks worth of episodes currently available to watch.

Bienvenue chez nous and 4 mariages pour une lune de miel also look good, but only have short clips available, probably because they aren't currently airing. Le meilleur pâtissier is in a similar situation. I may have to start actually using the systems these websites have for alerting users when episodes are available. I've been a little spoiled by the bottomless pool of constantly available Les Reines du Shopping episodes I've had so far.

Maiwenn wrote:ETA: I have really enjoyed reading about your process and progress! :)


I'm glad you're enjoying it! :D
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:55 am

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/videos

Importantly, 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.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby rdearman » Thu Jun 24, 2021 9:16 am

Un dîner presque parfait seems to be a copy of a British program called Come Dine with Me. You can read about the format on the Wiki page.
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Re: French via shopping-themed reality television

Postby improbablediscussion » Fri Jun 25, 2021 3:31 am

The standard format of Come Dine with Me is pretty different from Un dîner presque parfait. I haven't seen a lot of it, but it seems to vary between ~23 minute episodes that cover one host at a time and ~45 minute episodes that cram 4 hosts into a single episode at once. Bizarrely, it actually seems to be the most non-standard version of the program out there, despite being the original.

The format stuff I'm not totally sure of is mostly the entertainment section and the presence of "themes" for the dinner. If I'd just seen the two regular weeks on their own, I probably wouldn't be questioning whether they're fixed parts of the show, but having my first week randomly turn out to be a dinner party / dating show hybrid threw me off a bit.
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