A language learners’ forum

This thread comes partly in response to Rdearman’s thread about crazy challenges, partly as a further test of this experiment and partly from my belief/hope that hearing fairly simple and repetitive language will help to imbed the sounds, prosody and grammatical patterns in my brain. I had already been planning to use Peppa Pig and other simple cartoons to help me learn Polish and I thought maybe I should make it a challenge/experiment to see if anyone else wanted to join in.

I was originally thinking of doing an hour a day for a month of pure Peppa, but then I decided to make it more flexible. So, watch as much Peppa as you want per day for as long as you want, but it would be nice for the purposes of the experiment if you could roughly keep track of the time as well as say what other studying you have done before or during the experiment, and of course, when you’ve had enough snorting and grunting, and wish to stop, let us know what your results were.

My own expectations are that I will probably gain the ability to recognize a number of common nouns and verbs, possibly also a few adjectives like “big”, “little”, “old”, etc, and maybe some colors and numbers. I doubt that I will be able to produce many of them myself without further study. I hope also to gain a feel for the sounds and intonation and maybe some sense of syntax and very basic grammar. I’m not sure how many hours I’ll want to do before moving on to other things. I will probably make some use of the English transcripts as well. I’ve never studied Polish before and know only “yes” and “no”. I have dabbled in some other Slavic languages, but never enough to reach even A1.

If anyone would like to join me, I’ve hunted down some Youtube channels with Peppa in various languages as well as the transcripts in English. So, pick your Peppa and let’s go!

transcripts in English

BCS (Croatian)
BCS (mixed)
BCS (Serbian)
Cantonese
Catalan
Czech and Slovak
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Hindi
Hungarian
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian (w/ lector)
Lithuanian (w/ lector)
Macedonian
Mandarin
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Russian
Slovak, Czech
Spanish
Spanish (Latin American)
Swedish
Turkish
Turkish
Turkish
Ukranian
Ukranian

Let me know if there are problems with any of the links or if you’ve found some languages I’m missing. (I didn’t bother with some languages where I could only find one or two episodes.)

Hi Brun Ugle, this is great idea for a challenge, will be curious to hear how it goes. And just a small link fix, the link for Hindi goes to Croatian. I think it should be Hindi.

Russian : Свинка Пеппа
Season 1 (look in the playlists for the other seasons with the word сезон)
Russian transcripts: https://russian-with-peppa.jimdo.com/season-1/ (there is also the season 2)

Peppa La Porqueta in Català (Catalan) 47 episodes
edit: updated url and number of episodes

Oops. Thanks everyone! I seem to have had a problem with my copy and paste because I had that Croatian link several places. I think I've fixed it now. At least I got replaced all the extra instances of that link that I found. I'm not surprised I made a few mistakes. I spent over two hours tracking down Peppas.

Thank you for all the links! This looks awesome. Can I join in July? I'm preparing to take the DALF on July 6th, but after that I want to revive my Mandarin.

I haven't used Mandarin for almost 8 years. I learned Mandarin by taking a three week long A1 crash course and then spending 4 months in Mainland China. After that my university placed me in their intermediate level (3rd year for most). There I learned how to read the Chinese constitution but forgot how to order a coffee. I might have been at B1 (high) in my best days, but my pronounciation was always very approximate and I've forgotten everything else. I had a look at one of the Peppa Pig videos and I think that might be just the right level atm.

One hour daily is a bit much for me, but 15-20 minutes should be doable - Peppa Pig is surprisingly addictive.

I_likes_languages wrote:Thank you for all the links! This looks awesome. Can I join in July? I'm preparing to take the DALF on July 6th, but after that I want to revive my Mandarin.

I haven't used Mandarin for almost 8 years. I learned Mandarin by taking a three week long A1 crash course and then spending 4 months in Mainland China. After that my university placed me in their intermediate level (3rd year for most). There I learned how to read the Chinese constitution but forgot how to order a coffee. I might have been at B1 (high) in my best days, but my pronounciation was always very approximate and I've forgotten everything else. I had a look at one of the Peppa Pig videos and I think that might be just the right level atm.

One hour daily is a bit much for me, but 15-20 minutes should be doable - Peppa Pig is surprisingly addictive.

You can try it at anytime. I didn’t really mean it as the usual kind of challenge with a time limit and specific dates. This is more of an experiment (though not a very scientific one) to see what people get out of watching simple cartoons at varying levels. I’m especially interested in the results when starting from zero because I generally have not begun using “native” materials before reaching an intermediate stage and I think starting right from the beginning could be beneficial.

Hi Brun Ugle, thanks for the links! I'll try Greek "Πέππα το γουρουνάκι" videos (quite close to zero comprehension level).

Thanks, I needed this after Fernando Pessoa's philosophical stuff

My friend has been mentioning Peppa Pig for a long time, she lives in Finland and when her husband took a Russian class they recommended Peppa She finds it hilarious to watch it with him.

These short videos seem like a nice idea for a warmup btw, like when you're about to meet a native speaker or something.

I kinda like how they're not interesting enough to bring out my perfectionism and make me want to watch them all. I'll probably get bored before I run out of videos. And that's okay.

Well, this was better than Venezuela-Peru. Let's see whether Argentina will be more interesting.

That's an impressive collection of translations.