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.
Listening to the news when you only half have the language
Alex's first line is the honest state of a B2 learner in front of a bulletin: every word is known and the sentence is not. The reason is not vocabulary. It is that broadcast news is a written register read aloud, built out of three devices that spoken French barely uses. **What to listen for.** Nouns where you expect verbs; 'être' plus a participle with no agent; and conditionals that are not conditions. Those three account for most of the difficulty. Karim's advice in the last line is the practical form of it: find the verb of each sentence, and if there is no real verb, find the noun that is standing in for one. **Where to practice.** RFI's *Journal en français facile* is a daily ten-minute bulletin read at reduced speed with a transcript, and for this exact problem it is the single most useful thing on the internet; it is free. After that, France 24 and TV5Monde subtitle in French, which is better practice than subtitling in English. In Morocco, 2M and Al Aoula both carry French-language news alongside Arabic, and the French of a Casablanca bulletin is a little slower and a little more formal than a Paris one — which, at this stage, is a gift. **On trusting what you hear.** Who owns which French outlet, and whether that shapes coverage, is a live and sharp argument in France: media concentration in a few industrial groups, the funding and independence of public broadcasting, and the role of continuous-news channels are all actively disputed by people with real evidence on each side. This course is not going to rank outlets for you by reliability — that is neither its competence nor its business. What it can do is the thing that actually helps: teach you to hear the difference between 'le ministre a déclaré', which asserts, 'le ministre aurait déclaré', which does not, and 'selon nos informations', which asserts while refusing to say on what basis. A reader who hears those three apart can weigh any outlet themselves. **And a warning about one habit.** Do not copy this register into your own speech. 'Une hausse des prix a été constatée' in conversation is comic. Read it, hear it, and keep saying 'les prix ont augmenté'.