No but at this age you should probably ask yourself at what point in life did you stoop so low as to want to communicate with the French.

/s

It’s never too late to learn a language but it’s a bit of an uphill battle, and you’re not going to learn it by just watching shows. You need to practice regularly and understand the grammar and sentence structure. You also have to speak it with other people to get feedback, you can’t only learn to listen.

Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.

It’s never too late to learn a language. However, French is one hell of a step coming from English.

French is my main language and even if I’ve been speaking it for close to 40 years now, I still learn language exceptions and rules today.

Still, I’d give it a go if I were you, learning something new is always fun. Enjoy!

I work for the Federal Government of Canada, and for reasons that are hopefully obvious, it’s important that they are able to have a pipeline that teaches French to people over the age of 25 in about a year. It’s not as simple as just watching media though. The French training for public servants starting at 0 French is a full-time job. People literally disappear from their jobs for a year or more in order to learn French.

Never too late. Rote memorisation becomes more difficult as we age, but it’s not impossible. I’ve been learning one of the more difficult languages (Finnish) in my 40s for about 300 days now, and I am making progress.

Look into ‘active learning’, it’s far more effective than apps like DuoLingo (which I use heavily, it does have its place)

Yes you can, with one caveat.

According to Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, compelling, comprehensible input is sufficient to acquire a language. That means input that you find interesting and that keeps you engaged, and which you can understand at least in part. That evolving sweet spot can indeed take you from complete newbie to fluency without ever speaking.

In my experience, though, being able to speak with other native speakers is a huge source of motivation and creates its own compelling input. So I wouldn’t discount that.

I personally know someone who went from no English to being able to converse just by watching The Simpsons.

As others have said it is never too late to learn a language. Our brains are just as capable, if not more, when we’re adults.

I’m also a firm believer that comprehensible input (listening and attempting to understand) is the best way to learn a language. You can’t start with high level speech though. You need to start with speech that is aimed at beginners or you won’t understand enough for it to be effective.

Studying vocabulary in parallel helps a lot because it helps you learn niche words that don’t come up often in normal speech.

The typical recommendation with comprehensible input is to listen for around a thousand hours and then start practicing with conversation and books as well.

Good luck! Remember that with enough dedicated time you can learn anything. :)

Adults are worse at passive learning than kids, but focused learning works just fine. You’re probably better off buying/pirating something like rosetta stone than you are watching sitcoms.

What I’ve found to be helpful is to not learn the words first, but rather learn the sentence formation, and find parallels in your own language. Understanding sentence structure would really help in learning the language, and you can always substitute unknown words with English until you learn them. See how a sentence in your language is translated to that language, and see how the structure is different. Building parallels like this for different types of sentences would really help you learn the language better.

Similar to what the user with fancy letter said, you have to immerse yourself somehow, whether it’s travelling to a place where it’s regularly spoken and make an effort to speak it, or reading that language books along with a translation until your start recognizing patterns. If you are using a show or other material, you have to ask yourself to try to respond to questions in that language, or make questions that you would ask the show members or writer, etc. like:

De qu’est-ce qu’ils parlent?

Qu’est-ce qui se passe en la dernière partie?

Comment répondrais-je a ce question?

Quel est la message l’auteur (ou le personnage) envoye a moi?

The idea is passive listening will help you kind of understand what people are saying but it will still be difficult to make your own sentences. You have to learn it just like a little kid does.

I comment on jlai.lu and some of the Québecois communities occasionally but I often have to use translate to double check my work, because I’m like shit what was this word again or which grammar form was it? My high school French education was enough to stumble through ordering train tickets in Paris. I have no formal German education but I can grasp simple stuff posted to feddit.de German threads and I’m trying to get better.

I just need to spend a lot more time learning it and likewise you will need to follow up the time you spend passive listening to the French sitcoms with active learning and trying to figure out the language, so you should have additional resources ready to help with that.

ETA: Some of the resources other users suggested like Language Transfer seem interesting, I’ll give it a try myself too!

The answer is someplace in the middle. It’s not too late, but a year of sitcoms isn’t going to do it.

It’s likely too late to speak without an accent unless you already speak multiple dissimilar languages fluently.

I would say you probably won’t have as much success just listening to something than you would communicating back, no matter how much you immerse yourself. My spoken French is godawful, but my comprehension is good so I can follow along with tv shows and such, but my communication doesn’t improve much as there is no back and forth.

I went to Germany for summer work while I was at University; I was 24 at the time, due to military service prior to college. I spoke no German when I landed in Munich.

By the time I left Germany, I was 26 and spoke fluently enough to pass as a German from “some other state.” So I have some observations about this.

1. For Americans, German is an easy language. Count the number of credits your college offers for language courses. Spanish will be 2 (maybe 3) credits; German will be 3. French is 4. Russian and Japanese are 5; Mandarin may be 6. That’s directly proportional to how hard the language is for native English speakers; it’s how many hours of classes you’ll have to attend per week for the language. You’ve picked a moderately hard one, with French.

2. A month of immersion is worth a year of classes, with a caveat. If you want to learn French, find some temp work in France (or Quebec) and go spend a year working and living there. It will totally pay off.

3. The caveat? I didn’t study German, so I couldn’t really write it, and if I had to speak formally the facade would have collapsed. Immersion + study is the best combination.

4. Such that, when I got back to university, I tried to enter German language courses, and failed. 101 was absurdly easy, and impossible to take. 201 was absurdly hard, and impossible to pass. I could speak fluently, I just couldn’t do any bookwork. So, I ended up taking 3 years of French, instead.

5. Consequently, today - decades later - I can hold a passable casual conversaion in German, but not write letters in it; and I can read French pretty well and make myself understood through writing, but I’ve yet to find a French person who will acknowledge that they cam understand my spoken French. So, again: immersion plus study.

6. By the time I finished my last French class, and had my minor in it, I was 28. My advice there is that you should still be able to do it. It just won’t be as easy as when you were younger.

IME, you won’t pick much French up from sitcoms, and self-directed language courses are best as supplemental material. Move to a French-speaking country and work, and enroll in language classes there immediately. In a year, you’ll speak French. In two, if you have a good ear, you might be accused of fluency.

Anecdotally, I know a few immigrants that learned English through TV at a later age. If you’re interested, don’t let your age hold you back!