Why You Can't Understand Spoken French

You think you know French… until you hear it spoken. Learn some “rules” of real spoken French, using a real interview.

I hear it from my students all the time: they think that they know French… until they hear a real French person speak! That’s because spoken French is almost a completely different language from the written French you learned in school. We do a lot of “strange” things when speaking, making it difficult to understand.

Today, I’m going to break down a real French interview between French online media Konbini and Olivier Véran, our new Health Minister, to show you some of the most common unwritten “rules” of spoken French. With this knowledge, you’ll get a little better at understanding real spoken French. Enjoy!

Take care and stay safe.
😘 from Grenoble, France.

Géraldine

[TCt]

Damon and Jo taught us years ago to drop the ne.
Thumbs up if you get that reference 😉

[tenman]

I once told an acquaintance "j'en sais rien". Then I remembered his name was Jean so I then said "pardon, je n'en sais rien" to be polite.

[arthurharel]

I'm french and find these so entertaining. Makes me want to learn my own language all over again.

[gaston.]

merci Géraldine, these lessons are most practical and valued for getting to that goal of conversing in French.

[jcortese]

The only way I ever found to get over this hump is to force-feed myself a language constantly. Watch videos on YouTube, listen to podcasts 100% of the time. It's the only thing that works, and only after months and months. Getting off of the formal classroom language and into the real world as fast as possible is all that works.

[charleshamilton]

This was very clearly needed. Too many, myself included, arrived in France with our “textbook French” and immediately sounded like idiots to the average Joe on the streets of Paris. I imagine French speakers face the same dilemma; they arrive in the USA and we cringe at their clumsy attempts to speak 21st-century colloquial American/English. Note to French teachers everywhere: For the love of God, mention early in the teaching process the easy, informal, conversational French we will desperately need once we land at Charles de Gaulle.

[mizzmusicthief]

I love how you slowed his speech down for us, isolating the consonant abbreviations he did. Merci comme toujours pour votre aide avec la français!

[lugano]

An excellent breakdown. The big issue is that French, although a Romance language has a Celtic phonology thus it has a unique place in the Romance language world in that regard.

[jairdamian]

I knew it! I knew it!. :O
You, French people, tend to eat, not only letters but, entire words!! I often feel very frustrated because when I see videos or listen to some audios and I get to have available subtitles, I noticed that very often some letters and even complete words in those subtitles are not even pronounced and I got to the point of thinking that I was too slow to get 'em words accurately since it did not make any sense to me. But now, you have given an answer to that question of mine. I guess I need to try and be not so... "grammatical" all the time.
: /

[gill]

He also swallowed the "a"s though, the phrase "Je pense que ça aurait été tendu." Was kinda shortened to "J'pense qu'c'aurait été tendu."
I really love the way you explain it though, great video, I subscribed to your channel. :) I love French very, very much, I'm German myself but I speak it fairly well and when I was in France it was basically "understand or get reckt", so I figured out my way through the swallowed vowels and consonants and often words. 🙈😉
I kinda really like it now. 😊

[eobrien]

Thanks for this video, Géraldine! I think it’s very important for French learners to realize that this way of speaking is so common and very natural in everyday French, and that getting comfortable with it is so important because you’re going to hear things just like this most of the time. I am a high school French teacher and am always trying to show little things like this, and have a few phrases I use in class with students to show this (I use ‘chais pas’ a lot) but I will of course still show the formal/correct way written. I think it’s important to know both. You articulate things so well, like in this, and I LOVE your example of using a current, quick, news clip. Merci, c’est génial!

[Swimmer]

J'habite en France depuis six ans mais je ne parle pas très bien le français. C'est très frustrant.

[tmhc_gtgc]

I knew someone who took a French immersion course at Middlebury College in Vermont. In the course, they taught French the way it really is spoken by native speakers. He showed me textbooks from the course that had the real way to pronounce things in French, which was extremely different from the way I was taught to pronounce French. The phrase I remember seeing in one of his textbooks is that "Je ne sais pas" is pronounced chépa.

[pylchott]

I'm South African and a Northern Sotho speaker. The "swallowing" or "eating" of the *e* also occurs in my language if the *e* produces the vowel made by the *i* in the English word "big."

Also, we have the notorious French R sound (which we write with a G) though we also have the Spanish R too (tapped or trilled), so that's cool as most languages have one or the other but rarely both.

One other thing is that while in English they say "I'm 20, " the French will say *"j'ai 20 ans"* and we will say *"Ke na le mengwaga ye 20"* and it literally translates to "I have 20 years" just as it does in French.

Finding such parallels in these completely unrelated languages makes French a lot less unnatural, and reminds me that I sometimes might need to put aside my Anglo-centric mindset when dealing with other languages.

[uptoncriddington]

He also has a slight lisp which makes him even harder to understand when he revs up.

[rickharriss]

A big issue is when we speak our native language we don't make spaces between the words. Because of that a foreigner finds it hard to separate the words even if they know the vocabulary. I travelled widely in Europe for my job and was told many times that my English (i am from UK) was very clear and easy to understand, why? Because when talking to people who do not speak totally fluent English I make an effort to put a slight space between the words. It gives them a much better chance to hear them and understand.

[oukvczc]

When I started learning French and listening to native speakers here in France, I often heard, what I though was, the word 'ski'. Crikey, they talk about skiing alot. Until the day it dawned on me that they're actually saying 'ce qui'.

[sunfirefire]

It makes sense that they would omit 'ne'. When I am in a conversation I feel like I drag my sentence out and then that makes me forget the rest of what I want to say for a minute.

[supergillou]

Vous avez une parfaite maîtrise du français et vous avez très bien expliqué en anglais.

Ce qui est navrant, c'est de voir qu'un ministre de la république s'exprime aussi mal dans sa langue maternelle et emploie le langage populaire, alors qu'il représente l'élite de la nation. En plus il est médecin, donc nous avons la certitude qu'il a fait des études universitaires.
Il donne comme image de la France à l'étranger, l'image d'un pays et d'un peuple assez peu éduqué, assez vulgaire et ordinaire.

[Jneyr]

Thank you! I can now better understand what is being said vs what is being translated into the subtitles. I couldn't figure out how I wasn't hearing some phrases. Turns out those words were never there to be heard!