I didn’t have high expectations when I switched my Netflix profile to French around a month ago, but having the exact same level of comprehension before and after the experiment was certainly not what I’d expected. I thought I would have at least somewhat improved in the language, going into it in my third year of French, but no such luck. 

I changed my Netflix settings to French after a friend from my French III class had suggested it. Although, this idea wasn’t completely unfamiliar to me, as I’ve watched movies and tv shows all in French before, in the same effort to improve my skills with the language. But, despite those efforts, I experienced minimal success in expanding my comprehension and speaking abilities.

So, with the minimal success of watching French spoken works, I decided to give this a try, which excluded French from the movies themselves, but added the language to every other aspect of my Netflix home screen.

I’m not even on Netflix that often to begin with, as direct schoolwork takes up most of my time, so going on the provider, even in the name of learning, was a challenge. Henceforth, the lack of time that I had was already an issue going into it. Maybe If I had I done this experiment over a short break, or preferably the summer, I would’ve seen more positive results, but this lack of time proved to be unhelpful.

Although, whenever I did go onto Netflix, I would translate the French words by replacing them with things that I remembered from my previous English account. Unfortunately, those words almost always ended up being phrases I had already been taught and memorized in school.

This made the whole idea of learning new French vocabulary difficult, as every French word or sentence that I interpreted was always a phrase that I already knew. 

To teach myself new vocabulary, I would normally use resources like Word Reference, but to do that in this case would be tedious and time consuming. You would have to go on Word Reference every time you see a phrase that’s incomprehensible, which is definitely a lot.

All in all, I would say that switching my Netflix settings to French hasn’t helped me. But, despite my personal experience, I would encourage someone who wants to try new ways to learn French, or any other language, to give it a go.

If you are someone who, A: watches Netflix more often than me, or B: someone who has time to immerse themselves in the language they are learning and work on truly memorizing and understanding it, then this idea might just be for you.