Have any of you listened to the French-language version of the narrator intro to Jericho? I think it sounds hilarious.

Also, I feel that I can understand it almost 100%.

I have to ask myself...how is it that I can understand narration about demon hunters and alternative dimensions or what have you but at the same time when I write stuff in French on DSF about relatively mundane topics sometimes it seems my usage is a bit off?

It's far easier to read/understand than write/speak a foreign language. Reading will help you get used to the spelling, grammar and usage up to a point, but if you want to really be able to speak or write correctly, you'll need to you them yourself.

It's a bit like when you see someone do something and then try to do it yourself. Even if you've spent a lot of time studying the moves, you end up wondering how it's actually done.

Yeah, what Blade said. It's WAAY easier to read or listen someone else's foreign language than to then try to use it yourself. I've learned a bit of portuguese to go along my capoeira. I can read surprisingly long articles, and understand someone talking a little. I CANNOT make coherent sentences.

I should go to France and walk around on the street reciting the French-language intro to Jericho to get practice parsing sentences.

Anyway, even if French dubbing isn't the worse there is, there are a lot of bad dubbing out there. And I think that the systematic dubbing of movies and TV series is one of the reasons why a lot French can't speak English (or barely, with that terrible accent).