My #1 Tip to Understand Fast Spoken French
Want to understand FAST spoken French, no matter your level? This tip will help! (Maybe you’ve even noticed it?)
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0:00 - Intro
2:46 - The Most Common Swallowed Letter in French
7:45 - Cutting Other Letters in Speech
9:37 - Cutting Words Entirely
12:42 - Recap and practice!
Are you trying to improve your French fluency? One of the best things you can do is shift your time and focus away from the written French you first encountered in school (what I call “school French”) and instead try to get better at spoken French!
Written French and spoken French are almost two different languages, with a different set of “rules”. Making the switch isn’t always easy, so I thought I’d help by sharing my best tip for understanding fast spoken French, no matter your level. Can you guess what it might be? Watch the video to find out!
Let me know in the comments - did you notice this before it was pointed out to you? What are your biggest struggles when it comes to understanding fast spoken French?
Take care and stay safe.
😘 from Grenoble, France.
Géraldine
Please don’t stop making these “fast spoken French” / “real spoken French” videos! They have helped me tremendously!
I'm convinced the French do it just to annoy foreigners, particularly the British. The contempt I faced when trying to learn and speak French in France was extreme. The vast majority of the time, if they spoke English, they insisted in doing that, and if not they just seemed to ignore me. I admit my French is bad, but not that bad!
Bonjour Géraldine, I just want to express my thanks and appreciation for your excellent French lessons. I subscribed to your channel two or three years ago, and have learned so much from you. You are an extraordinary teacher, and since I was an English teacher for more that forty years, I am well able to make that judgment. So thank you again for helping so many of us who are trying to become fluent in your beautiful language.
Very helpful! No wonder it’s so tough understanding French person in real conversations 😅.
Such a thoughtful instructor, and excellent communicator.
I remember once I was sharing a room with a French guy for a few months in 1981. He often used to stop me mid-sentence and ask, "What was that you just said? You used words I don't understand." A lot of the words (elisions/contractions) were ones such as, "gonna", "wanna", "dunno", "woulda", " geddown", "geddoff", etc. He told me that it's important because language schools don't teach words used in the vernacular.
Five or seven years ago it was almost impossible to find infirmation on informal french. I somehow found out about it on accident in some obscure youtube video. I was quite overwhelmed and a little ticked that I was never told all this, but I buckled down and started searching for anything I could find on the subject. It really helped my comprehension. Though I still find serious french tv programs hard to understand because of it. I'm glad people are willing to go over this because many formal french instructors refuse to touch on the subject. We do this kind of thing in English too. I'm sure everyone cuts sounds in their own languages to make it flow faster. Like "do' (dough) know" for "don't know".
Yes, absolutely. I remember once I was sharing a room with a French guy for a few months in 1981. He often used to stop me mid-sentence and ask, "What was that you just said? You used words I don't understand." A lot of the words (elisions/contractions) were ones such as, "gonna", "wanna", "dunno", "woulda", " geddown", "geddoff", etc. He told me that it's important because language schools don't teach words used in the vernacular.
Thank you for the great lesson!
I've never heard anyone say dough for don't know in the US. Where is that used? It seems regional.
Dunno bou tha 😉
@@MsBettyRubble D'Oh!
Interesting, this is indeed exactly how I ended up speaking when I lived in France - but I guess I never stopped to think about exactly what was happening on a linguistic level. I just started "sounding more French" :)
This video is a revelation, thank you!
I don't know if African French is like Parisian French, but my African friends pronounce 'Maintenant' as may-nah. It took me a while to catch on.
Thank you for the lesson. It’s very helpful!
Excellent lesson
This is great, I love French drama but I cling to those subtitles, this helps a lot.
Thank you. Your videos always teach me something new.
Easiest way to understand fast spoken French -- click on the ⚙ icon and select playback speed 0.5. If the French person doesn't have a ⚙ icon, try clicking their bellybutton. That normally confuses them enough that they slow down.
Hilarious!
It's particularly common for locals of almost anywhere, to swallow letters/syllables involved in pronouncing the place name. A Local may say: Traw-na Spelled: Toronto "Correct": Tor-ON-to A local may say: ´ntar-eeoh Spelled: Ontario "Correct" On-TAIR-ee-oh. Of course, with an area the size of Ontario, or a city with the cultural diversity of Toronto, there will be major variation in "local" pronunciation. But I will still be very curious about the story behind anyone, English, or French as a first language, saying in casual conversation that they lived in "Mon-tree-all" for several years. There are several variations on how that might be said, including: Mun-ree-all, MON-ree-ahl, Munt-real... but if they're not just making things up, I'm sure there must be a story behind that textbook pronunciation.
Merci beaucoup pour cette nouvelle thème et très splendide vocabulaire de grammaire française
Excellent videos, they’re helping me tremendously as I navigate this space. 💪🏽🤠🇺🇸
Merci beaucoup pour pouvoir enseigner et expliquer cette nouvelle et grand thème du debut et matin de samedi dans le matin
Ah ha! My 4th grade self was SURE that people did not actually use the ne pas construction when chatting with friends. There was no plausible way people went to that effort. Sure, if they'd admitted it to us, it probably would have been even more maddening to learn properly, and it WAS super important to practice it, because it's challenging when you brain is used to English grammar. And even more complex when you finally get introduced to jamais and other negation phrases. But HA! My logic was solid. Humans shortcut spoken language. Period.
No entiendo nada pero me encanta
Merci beaucoup ! Mais le lien de la leçon complète n'est pas là dans la description. Pouvez-vous l'ajouter svp ?
C'etait très utile. Merci!
d'accord!
Thanks! Nonetheless that was Zurich and not Geneva ;)
D’main, pour l’aprèm, faut q’j’faire l’ménage.
aprèm is an expression used by french from France , in French canadian we use après-midi so '' Faut que j'fasse le ménage pour demain après-midi' ' or Demain après-midi, faut que j'fasse le ménage. ''que je fasse'' is the subjonctif présent of the verb faire. You are very close if you had said this sentence to me, I would have totally understood what you wanted to say .
🎉🎉
Il faut que j'apprends le français!===Faut q jappren français?...Merci Géraldine!!
Shouldn't that be "l'français"?
@@beeble2003 , Not when the fallowing word starts with a vowel; in this case, starts with an "f".
Actually, studying the 'rules' for everyday spoken French is no more use than knowing the rules for formal French. You can't really insert extra letters into a sentence you don't understand to make it more understandable, especially in the middle of a conversation. This advice is literally impossible to follow! No, the only way to improve your understanding of fast informal French would be to listen to lots of it, *after* you reach a level where you can at least get the gist of what the French speaker is saying. Trying to do this when you are on an A1 or A2 level is extremely difficult, unless you can find lots of fast spoken French which is still mostly comprehensible to you. Obviously, this kind of input is difficult to obtain.
J’ai le même problème avec ce conseil. Je pense que il n’y a substitut pour beaucoup de temps en écoutant les francophones natifs.
If you have the time to read some French novels that use colloquial dialogue rather than formally correct speech, it helps.