This afternoon after school, after helping me make strawberry shortcakes (with the last of our Bisquick), Kaitlyn asked to watch tv. And, just like at lunch, she asked for French tv.
I’m not going to tell her no. Watching tv is supposed to be a very good way to pick up the language. But French tv is, well, bad. Just plain bad.
First, we watched 9 minutes of commercials. Then some sort of game show came on, so we dialed around. Another channel had some American movie or tv show from the 70’s where we saw some guy put what I could only assume was a poisonous lizard in a room with an older woman doing her ballet exercises… not a good choice. I dialed to a station that’s a constant stream of talk shows all afternoon. Today they were discussing Carla: queen of France. Amazingly, they weren’t flashing any naked pictures of her up on the screen. At least not while we were flipping by. We settled on the Arts channel; it had on a show about some guy traveling in Asia eating foods at markets and unsanitary looking restaurants.
I may have to break down and find an actual tv schedule for our four French channels and steer Kaitlyn toward something worth watching. There has to be something. It would be good for all of us… if we could just tolerate it.
You can arm yourselves with a batch of French language DVDs. That way she could watch TV in French, and you’d have better selection of the content.
We have hundreds of dvd’s most, if not all, with French as an option. But she has never come home and said “Let’s watch Cinderella in French.” Apparently, to her, there’s English tv and then there’s French tv and it’s not ok to mix them up.
There’s marketers somewhere who are thrilled she distinguishes effectively between the two. I just signed a 121,000 Euro invoice paying for French tracks for one season of Half and Half, and $4,000 USD for an episode of High Chaparral in Portuguese (included here only because you were such a High Chaparral fan as a little girl). So someone must watch these things in French, and I’m glad to think it may be someone I love.
is it cheaper for canadian french?
French Canadian is around half to two-thirds the cost of Parisian French. However, things dubbed into French Canadian will only be accepted in Canada, not in France….while Parisian French is accepted both places. Thus we haven’t dubbed in French Canadian for about fifteen years.