French via shopping-themed reality television

[improbablediscussion]

Hi, everyone!

I've started a weird experiment in learning French, and this seemed like the place to post about it.

I was originally a German major in college way back when. I graduated with a pretty high reading and writing ability, reasonable formal speaking ability, and utterly abysmal listening comprehension. I could read and write essays about the Nature of Enlightenment, but didn't know a lot of common everyday words (like the word for "shoelaces").

Now, that's basically completely reversed. I haven't spoken or written German in something like 10 years, but I can half-assedly watch TV or listen to podcasts while doing something else and still generally understand what's going on, just like I do in English.

What took me from basically unable to understand colloquial German to able to understand anything I choose to listen to? Watching lots and lots of terrible reality television. More specifically, a TV show called Shopping Queen.

Shopping Queen

Shopping Queen is exactly what the name implies -- a shopping competition. Each week, 5 contestants are given 500 Euros and a set number of hours to find an outfit based on whatever the theme of the week is. Each episode features one of the contestants running around from store to store, trying stuff on and buying whatever they think works best. They're scored both by each other and the host, and at the end of the week, the one with the highest score is crowned the Shopping Queen.

Shopping Queen has a number of advantages as a language learning tool.

- Continuous dialogue. Scripted TV shows and movies are actually very prone to long silences, particularly in more serious genres. Shopping Queen, like most reality TV, is non-stop talking the entire time. If you watch a 50-minute episode, you get a full 50 minutes of language in your ears, every time.

- The dialogue is extremely likely to be in reference to something immediately visible on screen. This isn't true of most scripted TV shows and movies. If you watch, say, a crime drama, you might have some comments about stuff around the crime scene or something, but even then most comments will be abstract ones about who the victim was, who they know, etc. In Shopping Queen, on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of commentary is about whatever is happening on screen at that moment. The camera will often even do close ups of some specific aspect of a piece of clothing a person is talking about or show photos of other outfits that demonstrate the point the person wants to make. The language being spoken is paired visually with whatever it's about.

- Relatedly, it's very easy to understand what's going on without much/any understanding of what people are specifically saying. The format of each episode is exactly the same -- introduce the contestants, talk a bit about their life / home / usual approach to fashion, send them off to run around the city buying the outfit of the week, and then come back for the judging. Even if you don't understand the actual specific comments the judge or contestants are making about a given garment, it's still obvious what they're talking about in a general sense, and it's pretty easy to work out whether their feelings are positive or negative. You also don't need to remember earlier commentary to understand what is happening in later segments. The scores are always shown visually in addition to being said, so you always at least know the results.

Basically, it's perfectly watchable and entertaining even if you don't directly understand any of the language being spoken at all, making it easy to continue watching even at a low/nonexistent level of language comprehension.

- The topics of the show are centered around everyday concepts and activities. The majority of screen time is dedicated to clothing, buying things in stores, and people giving their opinions on whether they like or dislike things. During introductions, you hear about who people are and maybe a little bit about their age / family / job. During the outfit-buying section, the announcer gives a running commentary of the time and money being spent (e.g. "[Contestant] just spent 129 Euros on shoes, giving her a remaining budget of 88 Euros. Will that be enough to pay for both accessories and a hair stylist in the 47 minutes she has left?") This is usually paired with a countdown clock and/or list of how the budget has been spent on screen, making it easier to follow.

It's obviously harder to understand than anything in an intro-level language course, but it also gives a much wider range of examples of people talking about the topics lower levels of study are usually dedicated to.

- It airs five episodes a week, seemingly almost every week. There were already about a bazillion existing episodes even back when I was watching it, which couldn't have been more than a year after it started airing.

Shopping Queen did a lot to rapidly increase my understanding of spoken German when I watched it, and I definitely have it to thank for my ability to watch German TV in general. It did keep giving me the feeling that I would have been better off watching a couple seasons of Shopping Queen before starting any sort of formal attempt to learn German grammar or vocabulary, though.

Which brings me to my current experiment:

Les Reines du Shopping

There is a French version of Shopping Queen called Les Reines du Shopping. I'm going to watch at least one episode of Les Reines du Shopping at full attention per day until I hit 100 hours total. Episodes are ~50 minutes, so I'll probably do double episodes one or two days a week to ensure that I'm averaging at least 1 hour a day and will hit my goal within 100 days. At that point, I'll decide whether to keep going with what I've been doing or start some sort of active grammar/vocabulary effort. I've never studied French before in my life, so I'm inclined to see how far I can get on relatively comprehensible input alone.

The original German Shopping Queen is geo-locked now, which is a shame, but thus far it seems like Les Reines du Shopping can be watched by anyone who signs up for a free account. Not every episode that ever aired is up there, but it looks like there's at least a hundred episodes available at any given time. Definitely enough to reach my 100-hour goal.

I don't know how often I'll update or how much there will be to say, especially during the long middle period. I'm currently closing in on the 20-hour mark, so I'll give my initial thoughts then. I'll also definitely update at 100 hours about the general results of the experiment.

I'm open to suggestions for things I could do at 100 hours to see how much I actually picked up, keeping in mind that I'm not doing any reading and am pretty unlikely to know any sort of grammar. My current thought is to go back to the first episode I ever watched and compare how much I understand the second time around.

[improbablediscussion]

I've passed the 20-hour mark, so it's time to get my initial thoughts down before I forget them. I've already had a few surprises, most of which bode well for the rest of this experiment.

Note: when talking about vocabulary, I'm mostly going to stick to English words with English spellings rather than attempt to figure out French spellings of words I've generally only heard spoken aloud.

- I recognized more words from the start than I thought I would. Like, a lot more. I was actually pretty pessimistic about how well I'd recognize any of the handful of French words I knew through random osmosis (like "bien") as well as the words shared by French and English (or rarely, German). This was mostly because when I started watching German TV, I couldn't initially pick up a huge chunk of the German words that I knew and regularly used myself when spoken that quickly and casually (or in not totally standard accents). But for whatever reason, I haven't had major problems picking out shared vocabulary.

On top of this, it turns out that the amount of common words shared by French and English is a lot higher than I expected, and I was actually already expecting the crossover for fashion terminology to be a bit higher than average. But it turns out that there's a good amount of just general vocabulary shared in common (like "attention", "coincidence", "experience", etc) that gets used literally all the time.

I didn't previously understand why French is typically considered an easier language for English speakers to learn than German, but after a couple of hours of this, I started to see why. Going entirely on the cognates I could pick up on, I was already hearing fragments like:

XXXXXX makeup XXXXXX face elegant XXXXX

Whereas with German, I feel like someone at a low beginner level who tries native materials will often end up hearing stuff more like:

XXXXX I think XXXXXXXXXX makes and XXXXXXXXXXX is XXXXX

Which ends up conveying a lot less of the core information of what's being said.

- As many cognates as I did easily recognize, there were still plenty that it took a little while to notice were being said, like "bracelet", "quality", "horrible", and "envelope". I stopped picking up new ones about 7 or 8 hours in, though.

I ended up learning the word for "hundred" as a totally new word, not noticing its similarity to anything, only to spontaneously realize it was a very obvious cognate only after thinking about how it was probably spelled. I think that's how it's going to be for all the cognates commonly used on the show that I haven't managed to pick up on by this point -- I'll basically learn them as totally new words and only notice they're actually cognates when I eventually start reading and see how they're spelled.

- I've already run into a couple examples of similar-sounding words that don't mean what they instinctively seem like they should to an English speaker. To give the worst example, the French word for "gym shoes" is apparently "baskets"(!!!), which became very obvious within about a minute of the first contestant of that particular week going into a shoe store looking for "baskets". I would have never, ever been able to figure out what that word meant at my (non-existent) level of French without the extremely good context provided by the format of the show.

- I have learned a small amount of totally new words and phrases completely unrelated to English or German. Unsurprisingly, most of these terms are clothing nouns ("skirt", "sunglasses", "socks", and "jewelry" among them). I can distinguish between multiple different types of shoes. I haven't learned any truly new (non-cognate) verbs, though. My newly understood vocabulary is almost entirely nouns with a few adjectives and prepositions thrown in.

- For the most part, I have no ability to hear accents thus far, native or otherwise. There was one specific non-native speaker whose speech was awkward enough for me to notice, but that's about it. The host herself is Brazilian, and in general she sounds the same as everyone else to me (with the exception of a few specific things that seem more like possible catch phrases or stylized speech than actual non-native speaker differences). There have been a few other confirmed non-native speakers who didn't sound obviously different to me.

The first three groups of contestants I watched also each had a Belgian in the group. I couldn't hear any particular difference between them and the other French speakers, and I only knew they were Belgian because the show brought it up all the time. The show would constantly call each of them "the Belgian candidate", lead their segments with phrases like "let's get the Belgian opinion on this", and at one point even brought up Poirot. The show was constantly poking fun at the Belgians for using "Belgian expressions" when they talked, but with how OTT the general attitude towards Those Crazy Belgians has been, I am reluctant to take this at face value, lol.

- My assumption going into this was that I'd probably have to just sit down and learn French numbers on purpose at some point, even if hearing the numbers used in the show would make the process a little faster by familiarizing me with them. Even native speaker children are typically actively taught numbers beyond a certain point. I didn't think that the context provided in the show would be enough to actually learn much totally new number vocabulary, though original Shopping Queen was definitely very good for practicing hearing spoken numbers that I already knew.

However, after 20 hours of this, I'm a bit less sure that actively learning to count will ultimately be necessary. Most of the numbers used in the show are paired with either "euros", "minutes", or "hours" following them, making it easy to hear when they're being said. Between that and the scoring, I'm hearing a lot of numbers, and I'm starting to understand some of them even when they aren't printed on screen at the same time. The order that I'm learning numbers in is deeply weird (like learning the word for 14 before the numbers 6 through 9 simply because the scoring is out of 20 points and 14 is one of the most common scores contestants choose to give each other). I'm very curious to see where I'll be in this area at the end of the 100 hours.

- There are a bunch of words and phrases that I keep hearing over and over that I have no clue to the actual meanings of. Or worse, sort of half-a-clue to the context of without knowing the precise meaning. I'm currently aiming to figure out what the word "tendance" means before I lose my mind.

Overall, I'd say this is working better than I initially expected, but largely for reasons relating to the French language itself. I wouldn't be understanding nearly as much of the Turkish or Greek versions of this show, even with the generally good context provided by the format. I also tend to think that my progress will probably stall a bit now that I recognize the most commonly used nouns and obvious cognates.

[tangleweeds]

I think this is brilliant!! I might have to check it out myself...

[DaveAgain]

The original German Shopping Queen is geo-locked now, which is a shame, but thus far it seems like Les Reines du Shopping can be watched by anyone who signs up for a free account. Not every episode that ever aired is up there, but it looks like there's at least a hundred episodes available at any given time. Definitely enough to reach my 100-hour goal.

There seems to be a YouTube edition of The (German) Shopping Queens.

YouTuber SHOPPING QUEEN Teil 1

---
There was a presentation that might interest you, by a lady who advocated watching TV as a language learning tool, she had improved her school-girl french by watching 'télé réalité'.

Happy Christmas!

[Arnaud]

- I've already run into a couple examples of similar-sounding words that don't mean what they instinctively seem like they should to an English speaker. To give the worst example, the French word for "gym shoes" is apparently "baskets"(!!!), which became very obvious within about a minute of the first contestant of that particular week going into a shoe store looking for "baskets". I would have never, ever been able to figure out what that word meant at my (non-existent) level of French without the extremely good context provided by the format of the show.

Originally (in the 80's/90's) "Baskets" was the kind of shoes worn by basketball ("basket" in french) players (they cover the ankle like the Nike Air Jordan) and "Tennis" was the kind of shoes worn by tennis players (they don't cover the ankles like the Adidas Stan Smith). Nowadays, "baskets" has taken a wider meaning of "sport shoes" and the difference between "tennis" and "baskets" is not so obvious.

[improbablediscussion]

There seems to be a YouTube edition of The (German) Shopping Queens.

YouTuber SHOPPING QUEEN Teil 1

I'm kind of surprised this was allowed to stay up, even as a parody. Vox seems pretty aggressive about copyright/trademark enforcement!

Originally (in the 80's/90's) "Baskets" was the kind of shoes worn by basketball ("basket" in french) players (they cover the ankle like the Nike Air Jordan) and "Tennis" was the kind of shoes worn by tennis players (they don't cover the ankles like the Adidas Stan Smith). Nowadays, "baskets" has taken a wider meaning of "sport shoes" and the difference between "tennis" and "baskets" is not so obvious.

"Baskets" coming from basketball makes way more sense than any of the theories I'd come up with. I was seriously puzzled by that one.

[Lawyer&Mom]

As a native English speaker, you can 100% pick up French comprehension through massive input. I watched 15 seasons of dubbed ER and now I have at least B2 comprehension. Shopping Queen sounds delightful. Enjoy!

[improbablediscussion]

Update: 40 hours

I've made it to 40 hours, so it's time for another update.

- At the beginning of this 20-hour block, I wasn't hearing either the words "not" or "it's". I don't mean that I didn't understand them -- I mean that they were literally just zipping past without me even noticing them in the first place. My brain was pretty exclusively focused on content words, and I'd just infer whether or not a person was calling something, say, "modern" or "not modern" based on the context. This works pretty well with short sentences, like:

XXX modern + (person seems to approve and be giving praise) = "It's modern."
XXXXX modern + (person is clearly and emphatically disapproving) = "It's not modern."
XXX modern + (against it in a more ambiguous way) = "It's modern." (...but it's not supposed to be. We're doing something else right now.)

Of course, this isn't 100% effective, and it doesn't work so well when those phrases are stuck in the middle of a longer block of speech. When you're hearing something like:

...XXXXXXX ideal XXXXXXX modern XXXXXXX tendance XXXXXXX....

...it can be difficult to know whether or not that's a bunch of simple "is"-statements stuck together or some kind of longer, more elaborate statement.

That's kind of where I was at the beginning of this block, until I had this weird, sudden burst of understanding right in the middle of one episode. Just out of literally nowhere, I could suddenly hear and understand the word "not" every time it was used. I could also suddenly hear and understand both "it's" and "it's not" whenever they were used, even in the middle of really quick, dense dialogue.

Shortly after that, the show cut to the host explaining what she thought about the outfit of the day, and instead of hearing the example I gave above, like I would have previously, it resolved into:

"...It's not ideal. It's not modern, it's not tendance...."

And I've consistently been able to easily hear and understand full sentences of this very basic type ever since, even when spoken quickly or crammed in among other longer sentences. It also seemed like I was noticing larger portions of the sentences I heard in general from that moment onward, whether I understood the actual words or not.

I had sudden weird leaps in understanding when doing this in German, but it always happened between episodes. Like I'd sit down to watch an episode and suddenly understand way more of what was being said for no reason, and the things I suddenly understood weren't even necessarily related in any obvious way. It was bizarre to have it happen mid-episode, though. I'd always assumed the process somehow involved sleep.

- Shortly after I posted my previous log where I mentioned going crazy trying to figure out the meaning of the word "tendance", it actually became a point of contention on the show itself!

The challenge that week involved choosing an outfit that had to be "tendance", and in one episode, the host and all four of the other contestants unanimously agreed that every single decision the contestant of the day was making was "not tendance". Everyone was getting really riled up about what is and isn't "tendance", to the point that the announcer asked the host to give her own personal definition of what it means to be "tendance". Which she did.

...Unfortunately, it was far beyond my ability to understand at this point! All I got out of it was that huge leopard-print coats were apparently "super tendance". I've marked off that episode in my tracking spreadsheet so that I can come back to it later. I want to know what her opinion was.

However, in the meantime, I'm pretty sure I've figured out what it meant on my own. Nobody really actually disliked the un-"tendance" clothes the woman was choosing, and they actually kept describing them as "classic" and "elegant", while constantly also saying "but that's not tendance!" Between this and another candidate who was contrasted in the opposite direction ("Her style isn't classic -- her style is tendance"), I've been able to work out that it's something like "trendy"/"trendy stuff", and if you're aiming for "tendance", you're aiming to be on trend.

Thus far, I haven't run into anything that really contradicts this meaning, though I have also heard the word used in a separate non-fashion-related sense.

- Weirdly, contestants being criticized for getting the theme of the week partially or entirely wrong in some way has been really useful for both learning and clarifying vocabulary. I originally learned the difference between two different words for coat because the host declared that what the contestant was trying on was too long to be a (short coat), and something that long is properly called a (long coat).

This has helped me to learn some pretty fine distinctions between some terms that I probably wouldn't have otherwise picked up on. An oversized blazer doesn't count as a (long coat), even if it is long enough reach your knees!

I've gotten familiar enough with some of the terms that I sometimes object to what the contestant is picking myself even before the host (or other contestants) appear on screen to declare it wrong! Whenever this happens, I feel a bit like I passed a vocabulary pop quiz.

- There are some words that I currently only understand in terms of what they're related or opposed to. I don't know exactly what "branchée" means, but I know that you haven't managed it if you're "classic", and you really haven't managed it if you're "basic".

- From the beginning of my watch, there have been occasional moments where the contestant would go to buy something, be told something by the cashier, and then immediately just lose it with glee. Even without understanding the words, it was pretty clear that they were getting whatever item it was for free. The running budget tracker backed this up by just writing "offerte" in the spot where the item cost usually goes and showing that the remaining budget had not decreased.

Along with this, I started to notice moments in the show where a contestant would enter a store and the show would say that there's a special item in the store. The host would get excited and always hope that the contestant would buy it. So, it didn't take much to come up with the possibility that the special item was a selected/planted item that would be free if the contestant picked it, but I didn't know for sure.

I've been on the lookout for confirmation, though. I started to actually hear the contestants / cashier say that the item was free when it happened. I also started to understand more of the talk about the special item of the day whenever it came up. And then finally, in one episode, the announcer straight up said that "the purse costs 199 euros, but if she actually buys it, it'll be free" (paraphrased). And I understood the explanation!

So, random specific thing, but this is pretty representative of how progress has been in general:

(Understanding entirely through context) -> (Knowing some random individual words and using context to interpret them) -> (Having enough words to straight up understand some entire sentences)

- This has happened in other areas of the show as well. Initially, I could only understand the host's fashion advice through her gesturing and the example images paired with what she said. I now have enough basic vocabulary to understand when she's saying something simple like "I'd prefer it with a leather belt", even when it isn't paired with obvious context clues.

- Between 30 and 35 hours in, I'd gotten to the point where I could mostly pick up numbers about two to three syllables long. Go longer than that, and the middle would often cut out. So, I might understand a number like 135 in its entirety, but then hear 235 as "two hundred XXX five".

This led to me getting really confused over the numbers between 70 and 100, because I started hearing stuff like "four XXX nineteen" while seeing the number 99 appear on screen.

Once I was hearing most numbers accurately (if not in their entirety), the ones that I was clearly hearing totally wrong started to really bug me. So I started skipping back and relistening to any numbers that I heard and expected to be wildly different from what they turned out to be. I only had to do this a few times before figuring out what was going on -- "four twenty nineteen" = 99. Which... okay, was not expecting the sudden appearance of base20 counting for a random subsection of numbers!

Once I knew where the weirdness was coming from, I went back to just regular listening. I'm still hearing two to three syllable numbers most consistently, which means that while I can now hear a number like 80 reliably, numbers like 99 still have missing pieces. I'm no longer confused when I hear something like "four XXX seventeen" and see a number like 97, though.

- When I say I hear "two to three syllable" numbers most reliably, I do mean that range. I still sometimes have problems hearing some single syllable numbers used totally on their own in the middle of sentences. Mostly the numbers 6, 7, and 8. I know them, but I can't always pick up when they're being used. The word for 8 is particularly blurry to me.

- On the plus side, my brain has finally absorbed the word for 13. I no longer have to go through a process of thinking I heard the number 3, remembering that the actual word for 3 is something else, and at that point realizing that I'm actually hearing 13.

- I did randomly learn the actual word for basket.

So, that's where things are right now. I should update again at 60 hours or so.

[improbablediscussion]

Mini-update:

I've reached 50 hours! The experiment is half done. I've been able to get in more than one episode a day for the past week, so I'm here a little earlier than I was expecting to be.

Some notable things did happen in the last 10 hours (like non-cognate verbs existing now), but I'll go into it in the 60-hour update.

[improbablediscussion]

Update: 60 hours

It feels like more happened in this past 20 hours, though it was concentrated in a few pretty specific areas.

- In general, I understand whole numbers in the range typically used on the show (0-500, as well as simple thousands). Numbers like "15,25" are still hit or miss. I'm more likely to understand the entire thing if there's a word like "euros" in there to help.

- I realized toward the beginning of this block that I'd been hearing the phrase "out of twenty" during the scoring for the entire run of the show without noticing it. I had previously been hearing the whole phrase sort of smushed together, like there was a word "outoftwenty" that I didn't know the meaning of. Now I hear "out of" as its own word, whether it's "out of twenty", "out of ten" (the scoring used in the earliest episodes), or anything else.

- I can hear the number eight reliably now, however it's pronounced. I'm not totally sure what pronunciation I'd aim for if were speaking, though. I don't know how much of the variation in pronunciation is different accents vs people speaking quickly. If I desperately needed to say "eight" in French at the moment, I'd just pronounce the word "wheat" like a Texan would and hope for the best.

- I finally learned the word for yellow! All the other common colors (and some less common ones) were similar enough to English words to pick up within the first few episodes I watched, but "yellow" has been eluding me. Contestants tend not to interact with yellow clothes, and don't frequently refer to the actual fact that they're yellow when they do.

This meant that I ended up learning how to say things are checkered or in blue leopard print before I learned to say they're yellow, which was starting to feel a little weird. I've been keeping a very short list of things that I intend to look up at 100 hours if I haven't spontaneously learned them by that point, and "just learn what the word for yellow is" was previously on it.

- In my first update, I said that I hadn't learned any non-cognate verbs. This wasn't strictly true. During that first 20 hours, I learned two ways of telling people to hurry up. However, I didn't count either of them at the time, since I didn't know for sure that either of them were verbs. In German, you could literally say the equivalent of "fast!" in that situation.

However, I know now that one of the two definitely means "go" specifically, and I've been hearing it used in reference to going to specific places and so on.

- I've been hearing far more verbs in other situations as well. I can hear the verb used when contestants are giving their scores, for example. There are also some verbs consistently used when contestants are talking about what they're going to buy next. I also realized recently that contestants are sometimes asked whether or not they personally would buy/wear/choose whatever outfit the contestant of the day is trying on, and they generally respond with the equivalent of "I would" or "I wouldn't" before going on to say what they think about the outfit in general.

For a lot of these, I have a very general meaning, but don't know exactly what the verb means. Someone saying "I (apparent verb) shoes" before heading to a shoe store could specifically be saying "I need shoes" or "I'm going to get shoes" or any number of other things. So, I think it's probably going to take a little longer to learn specific meanings for verbs than it does for nouns.

I was able to figure out that one of the words being used means "lack", though, because someone dissed someone else's outfit by saying "it lacks elegance". I've since noticed it coming up in other criticism as well.

- Part of the reason I've been hearing more verbs is that I'm hearing more sentences without any obvious known content words. Previously my brain was sort of ignoring some of the words I know when they appeared in sentences I had no ability to understand at all. Like, I knew the word(s) for "you" from the beginning, but I would only actually hear a "you" if it was used in a sentence with enough other known words to give it meaning (e.g. "If you're small, be careful with large jewelry.")

Now, however, I'm hearing basically every word I know all the time, whether the specific sentence is comprehensible or not. So I'm finally hearing stuff like:

"If you XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, (apparent verb) the XXXXXXXX with XXXXXXX!"

Which would have previously just flown by me without really being noticed at all.

- I'm already feeling a little tempted to try some other French TV, but I'm going to stick to Les Reines du Shopping until I've reached my 100-hour goal, since it's not that far away. I've been looking through the 6play website to find some shows that aren't geoblocked to add to the rotation at that point. I've actually been kind of lucky with Les Reines du Shopping -- it turns out a lot more of their stuff is locked away than I realized! Even some of Cristina Cordula's other shows are unavailable to Americans.

I've found a few possible candidates that are both available and look like they might have some of the same comprehensibility advantages of Les Reines du Shopping, though, so I do have something to try when the time comes.