As all the other things I tried to learn French, this seemed a great idea at first. Spend an evening at the flicks watching one of those avant garde French films, and effortlessly learn the lingo by letting it seep into your sub-conscience, thus combining pleasure with utility. Unfortunately there were a few problems.
Firstly, I hate avant garde movies! I have enough problems in my real life, thank you very much, and don’t need it in my time off from reality. I want easy laughs and cheap merriment! Difficult to come by in the French movies available outside of France
Of course, one can order them on Amazon.fr, and I have done that, but again have experienced a few difficulties. (a) How do you find out about these funny French movies, which no one talks about except in French, which you don’t yet understand? If you ask French friends, chances are they won’t tell you, because they don’t want to ruin their sophisticated image abroad and instead recommend the usual boring irritating problem movies to you. (b) Every time I order something from Amazon.fr my credit card gets refused with some incomprehensible – well, French – blurb, to the effect that my card doesn’t work. A week later I receive whatever I ordered in the post. Go figure!
The other option is to watch American or British movies using the French language track, and/or French subtitles. Again, this is fraught with difficulties. The main being, that the people who translate the language track and the ones who translate the subtitles don’t communicate, which results in two different versions of the film. So if you were hoping to learn how to correlate the written and spoken word in French by watching these movies you can forget it.
OK, let us assume you have gotten your hands onto some movies in French and are ready to spend an evening at home educating yourself. This is what happens.
First attempt. You watch the movie in French with English subtitles – hey, you want to understand what’s going on, right? And what about your loving partner/cat who watches it with you and has no interest in learning French? Exactly. The trouble is, you focus on the subtitles and stop listening to the spoken words, except as a sort of background music. Result, No French Was Learnt.
Second attempt. You watch the movie in English with French subtitles. You become caught up with the action and quickly cease to pay any attention to the subtitles. Even when you do read the subtitles occasionally, they rarely correspond word for word with the language track. Result, No French Was Learnt.
Third attempt. In a desperate effort to salvage the Learn French by watching Movies option, you watch the film in French with French subtitles. You understand nothing, get bored, and give up. Result, No French Was Learnt.
Actually, there is a way of learning French by watching French movies, and I have done it (to an extent). I shall discuss it when I start my series, How to Learn French in Ten Difficult Lessons, sometime in the new year.
For now, watch French movies by all means. Just don’t expect to learn French that way. Your experience will be exactly the same as trying to learn French by listening to native speakers or taking French lessons. OK, that was my experience, it may be different for you. But this is a blog series for people who have tried everything to learn French and wonder why they did not succeed. It is not a blog for people who have tried to learn French and have succeeded.
I am sorry – well, perhaps a tiny bit – if I sound defeatists and negative. I am tempted to blame it all those avant garde French movies, but alas I have not watched any for decades. It is just that I have been told so often how easy it is to pick up a foreign language. All those comments by friends & relations - You have learned French for three years now, aren’t you fluent yet? No, I am jolly well not, my French is still abysmally awful and I resent the implication that it is my own fault for not having tried hard enough. Sure, if all you want is say Please and Thank you and Hand over a pint & a pickle sandwich, yeah I can do all that, but that hardly counts as speaking a language.
Learning a language properly is hard work and takes a long time. Unless you have a really good reason to do it, don’t even try. If you want to find out more about another culture, read a few books about it. If you actually go to another country, learn to say in the native language, ‘I am terribly sorry but I can’t speak your language. It is a scandal and an insult to your great culture, but my tiny brain couldn’t handle it. Please do forgive me.’ Usually they reply, ‘Hey, no problem, I speak English!’
Of course, if you actually want to live in another country, or spend a considerable amount of time there, you must learn the language! It could be a matter of life and death. Just imagine being stuck up a lonely mountain side during a walking holiday in a backwater where no one speaks English, with an injured friend rapidly bleeding to death, unable to call for an ambulance! That’s what I mean about being motivated; it is precisely this scenario that determined me to learn French.
