Spoken French • Bloqués - Les aventures de Serge le Mytho et Steve Jobs

If you understand this clip, you can talk to (not so) young people.

Salut tout le monde, welcome to a new episode of Spoken French! Today's video is one you won't understand at all. At least not at first. That's the point: it's basically a concentrate of everything I've covered so far on informal French: argot (slang), verlan (that backwards-slang thing French people love), and humor, all rolled into one clip.

But this video is also an episode from the Bloqués series with Orelsan, the famous rapper, and his sidekick Gringe. And more importantly, it’s the debut of the character Serge le mytho — played by Jonathan Cohen, who’ll get his own spin-off series later on. As the name suggests, Serge le mytho(mane) is someone who does nothing but tell tall tales. In French we’d say il raconte que des salades — literally “tells nothing but salads,” meaning he spins one lie after another. And the two guys squatting on the sofa believe every word of it like total suckers.

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So how do you use this resource?

First, watch the video once, with no subtitles (there aren’t any anyway). Rate your understanding — as a percentage if you like, or just: “I got everything,” “I didn’t get much,” or “it’s all Chinese to me” (c’est du chinois pour moi, as the French say when something sounds like gibberish). The title alone should give you some context. Remember: Serge is a mythomane.

If it’s too fast, remember you can slow it down a little on YouTube. I recommend setting it to 0.95x to keep it natural.

Next, read through the vocabulary list pulled from the video and try watching again.

• aux States — casual, very common way of saying “in the States” / “in the US” — French speakers often just borrow the English word rather than saying aux États-Unis.

• mon reup — verlan (backwards slang) for mon père (my father). Say the syllables of père backwards and you basically get reup.

• poto — slang for pote, meaning “friend” or “buddy.”

• ouf — verlan for fou (”crazy”). It pops up twice: “un ouf des fruits et légumes” (a crazy guy in the fruit-and-veg business) and later “un truc de ouf” (a crazy/wild thing).

• ça cartonnait de malade — a very informal way of saying “business was booming” or “it was going really well.” Cartonner on its own already means “to be a huge success”; tacking on de malade just cranks up the intensity.

• Rungis — not slang, but useful context: it’s the giant wholesale food market just outside Paris, the place any French fruit-and-veg seller would go to stock up.

• avoir un délire / un tic — to have a quirky little obsession or a recurring habit, something a person does over and over almost compulsively.

• caisse — slang for “car.” “Eh mec ! Elle est où ma caisse ?” = “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

• péter un boulard — to totally lose it, to freak out or flip out.

• t’es un génie — “you’re a genius,” said here sarcastically and admiringly at once.

• la pomme quécro — quécro is verlan for croqué ("bitten"), so this literally means "the bitten apple."

• putin — a softened spelling of putain, a very common (and very mild, almost reflexive) French swear word used for emphasis, like “damn.”

• j’te’l donne — casual contraction of je te le donne, “I’ll give it to you.” Notice how in spoken French, je te le practically melts into one sound.

• c’est pas golri — golri is slang for rigolo (”funny”), so this means “that’s not funny.”

• oim — verlan for moi (”me”).

• répleu — verlan for pleurer (”to cry”).

• une polémique — “a controversy” or “a public backlash,” exactly what erupts over the iPhone name.

• ma reum — verlan for mère (mother), the female counterpart to reup — same backwards-slang pattern, different parent.

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Starting to piece together what it’s about? What’s your comprehension level now? There are three main jokes you need to catch:

• The origin of the Apple logo

• The controversy around the iPhone 7’s name

• The Japanese wink (le clin d’œil japonais)

Watch the video one more time. So, do the jokes make sense now?

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I’m not going to hand you the solutions, because I want you to struggle a bit — je veux que vous galériez, that’s the whole point of these episodes. If I gave you the sentences outright, I know you — you’d just read them without even trying to understand first. And that’s exactly the most valuable part: listening over and over until the message finally clicks. It might feel like torture, but the more you do it, the easier real-life listening becomes.

Between us: it’s better to be frustrated alone in front of your computer screen than in front of the boulangère (the bakery lady) with a line of impatient Parisians breathing down your neck! Bon ok, la boulangère ne parle pas en verlan…

But since I’m nice, I’ll drop the script for this episode in the paid subscriber chat next week. C’est plus fort que moi — I just can’t help myself.

In the meantime, you can brush up on your argot and get a head start on your verlan!

Bises,

Timo

Hey, I’m Timothée.

I write about the French language the way it’s actually lived: through cafés, music, awkward conversations, old expressions, cultural rituals, and all the small things textbooks usually forget.

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