Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Coming back and hearing it differently
Alex's first complaint is the one every returning learner makes, and Sophie's reply in line 3 is the correct diagnosis: Paris has not sped up. A year of Québécois, Belgian, Swiss, Senegalese, Ivorian, Moroccan and Martinican French has retuned his ear, and the variety he started with now sounds like one of several rather than like the default. **That is the whole argument of this year**, and it is worth stating plainly at the end of it: there is no such thing as the real French. Parisian French is a prestige variety with institutional weight behind it — the dictionaries, the broadcasters, the examinations, and most textbooks including the first half of this one. Prestige is a fact about a variety's position in society, not about its correctness. The French of Montréal, Brussels, Geneva, Dakar, Abidjan, Casablanca and Fort-de-France are not approximations of Paris; they are what French is in those places, with their own norms and their own speakers who are not making mistakes. **On interruption**, since it is the thing Alex notices first. Overlapping speech is described by people who study French conversation as generally cooperative in France — coming in before the other speaker has finished signals engagement rather than impatience — and the tolerance for it is not the same everywhere in the francophone world: Québécois and Swiss norms leave more space, and learners who arrive in Paris from either often read French turn-taking as rude before they read it as warm. Sophie's line 5 is the local view, and your experience may differ; the practical upshot is that waiting politely for a long gap in Paris means not speaking. **And what to do when somebody comments on your accent.** They will. A learner who has spent time in Québec or West Africa may be told in Paris that their French is 'charmant' or that they have 'un petit accent', and there is nothing to do with that but accept it. The alternative — flattening what you learned somewhere real in order to sound more Parisian — trades something you earned for something you borrowed.