[plainnoodles]

I took 5 years of french in high school and really loved it, so I leaned into it heavily and read novels in French, etc. I felt pretty confident in my vocab and grammar, and I even had a decent time reading some of the Old French stuff from classic novels (I disliked my English teacher and loved French, and since English class at that point is less about the language and more about literary analysis, I asked if I could read the books (where the original was in French) in their native language, and she could hardly refuse such a reasonable and intellectually curious request! So anyway I read Madame Bovary and L'Etranger and a few other older books whose titles escape me).

And on the more modern side, I could read French newspapers quite well too.

But at no point could I ever reliably make out more than the gist of what an actual French speaker, speaking normally, said. We have two Belgian exchange students and I struggled to understand them, and just watching French video content, similar struggles there.

I don't know if it's like this for every language where native speakers just talk really fast and there's a large gulf in comprehension speed for learners to close, or if it's something specific to French, but I know your pain here.

[mabub24]

Reading and conversing are really almost like two different skills.

A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training. With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge with French is that, like in English, native speakers "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in English).

It gets even more complicated when French has different formal and casual registers that are much more distinct than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most people speak in a much more argot mixed way.

Now add onto that different regional dialects like Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them), Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou francais standard to be the easiest to understand).

The best solution is just immersion. And constant use. Language is used, and use is the best method for improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have to learn the right rules in the language game for things to "make sense".

[jodrellblank]

Learning Morse Code it's tempting to start slow. The problem is you get skilled at "slow Morse" and it's hard to speed up, since the sounds and feel change. An alternative is to learn with fast Morse characters or words from the beginning but with long gaps between them for thinking time. Then as you need less thinking time you can shrink the gaps and be fast.

I haven't seen online discussions of this idea for language learning, but I wonder if the same technique could be used? Hear snippets of fast French, words or short phrases, with long gaps for you to think what they said. Then as you understand quicker, need less thinking time, shrink the gaps. ?

Maybe even as simple as a "press space for next sentence when ready, or R to repeat".

[It's also an interesting thing about language comprehension / artificial intelligence. After hearing a thing in English I have awareness of whether or not I understand it, and can correct small misunderstandings without further input, only time and imagination, e.g. "it makes no sense in context, maybe they said this instead" or "I just realised that someword said in their accent would sound like that. It might be someword they said"].

[usrusr]

Interesting line of thought! For French I'd say definitely go for gaps between full sentences, because sentences because single words have almost as little to do with spoken French as single letters.

Which is my pet peeve with French: when I feel particularly bad at talking English (I'm German), it feels natural to fall back to a sequence of separate words that isn't a sentence but gets some message to the receiver (while making me sound like the imbecile that I might be, but it does the job and sometimes that's worth this cost). For French, I feel like there's no alternative to trying to form a sentence. And on my level, that works worse than the English "words no sentence" fallback would (and if it does not work it will certainly also fail to make me seem anywhere close to competent in the language)

[yonaguska]

R to repeat would be an amazing vlc plugin. If an audio file was annotated, having a repeat button that jumps back to the last tag, and double tapping goes back to the previous previous tag.

[sersi]

In my experience with other languages (can't say for French since that's my native language), it's normal. I'd say that for someone at your level who has extensive vocabulary and good reading comprehension, just staying a month or two in France would be enough for you to get to the point where you wouldn't have issues understanding French speakers speaking normally.

Also, once you do understand French speakers, you might not understand other accents. For example, even as a native French speaker, I struggle with Québécois.

[jgwil2]

As an English speaker who learned French, Spanish, and German I'd say that of the three, French has the biggest gap between written, formal language and spoken language, especially in informal contexts (e.g. conversation among friends and family). I would also say that for all languages, reading comprehension and and listening comprehension are two different but complementary skills.

[908B64B197]

Takes time to get used to any accent.

Americans struggle in Ireland for instance. Or people from the northeast once they get to Louisiana.