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Understand everything, produce almost none
That is the whole recommendation, and Karim gives the reason in the last line: slang carries information about who is speaking. It is marked by age, by place, by group and by era, and when the marking does not match the speaker, the listener hears the mismatch rather than the word. An adult learner saying 'keuf' or 'wesh' is not heard as fluent. They are heard as performing, which is a worse outcome than saying 'policier'. **The asymmetry is the point.** You will hear all of this — in series, in rap, in films, in any conversation among people under thirty — and not understanding it costs you the conversation. So learn it to recognise, with the register label attached to each word, and let your own speech stay at 'courant'. Nobody has ever been thought cold for saying 'le travail'. The exception is the small set that has gone fully general — 'ouf', 'relou', 'chelou', 'un truc', 'un mec', 'le boulot', 'la galère' — which you can use once you have heard people around you using them. **Verlan has a history**, and the short version is that syllable inversion is old in French argot, that it became the characteristic slang of the Paris banlieues from the 1970s onwards, and that a handful of its words have since entered general usage to the point of appearing in dictionaries. Some of it has been re-inverted once already, which tells you how fast the system turns over: a word that is inverted twice is a word whose first inversion stopped being secret. **One group of words needs saying plainly.** Some verlan names groups of people — 'beur' from 'arabe', and 'rebeu' from re-inverting it. Whether these words are affectionate, neutral or offensive is genuinely disputed among the people they describe: some have claimed them, in music and in writing and in the name of a radio station; others reject them as labels imposed from outside; and the answer differs by generation and by who is speaking. This course is not going to adjudicate that, and it is not going to hand you a rule that lets you use them, because the disagreement is real and a learner has no standing in it. Recognise them, know they are contested, and use the ordinary words. **Where to meet the rest.** Subtitled French series, French rap with the lyrics in front of you, and stand-up. All three are full of exactly this register, and all three give you the social context along with the word, which a list never does.