Television Shows include Talk Shows, Documentaries, News, Game Shows, Comedy shows, Variety Shows, Sports, Sitcoms, Dramas, Scifi, Supernatural and Fantasy Shows, Soap Operas, Historical Shows, Adventure or Action Shows, Cooking Shows, Cartoons, Reality TV, DocuDramas, Police procedural or Crime Shows. Some if not all can certainly be a value add to your learning and offer a similar if not same benefit as the movies can!
TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken French; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken French that rarely show up in regular French lessons or textbooks. This includes some street slang, subcultural expressions, shortened words, and even some beautiful poetic lines.
Choose a genre that’s simplistic to understand in the beginning raising the bar with every lesson learnt efficiently. Remember that the French language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1960s and 70s to how it’s spoken today, so you may avoid learning from old shows.
Don’t miss watching News in Slow French at any cost. It would be your friend for a lifetime!
Let’s now see how to learn French by watching French Television actively
Watch the show fully without any subtitles and record it simultaneously(if not available online to see again).
Just soak up on the plot and try to grasp the “feel” of the show, what does it wish to convey.
Go back to the start and re-watch it scene-by-scene: first, with no subtitles.
After you’re done watching it in its entirety, watch it scene by scene to see which words you can grasp even without the help of subtitles. Every time you hear a word you’re not familiar with, write it down.
Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles.
The French subtitles will help you get the spelling and articles used correctly. But if you want to check if your understanding is correct, switch on the English subtitles in your 3rd viewing of that particular scene.
Pay attention to the vocabulary and the context on how the words were used.
Look out for any idioms and slang, and take note of the grammatical structures used in the sentences. Write down anything interesting you noticed, and be ready to review it later on.
Listen and repeat new words.
If there are some new words that you cannot seem to pronounce, listen to it and repeat the words and sentences over and over until you get the hang of it.
Look up the words you don’t understand.
If there are some things about the movie that are bugging you—slang terms, regional jargons, double meanings, wordplays, and subtle humour that you couldn’t quite grasp—do some research or ask a native French speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.
Finally, the last step to learning French with Television is to feel free to watch it as many times as you want—with subtitles and without.
