September 2010

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September, its la rentrée and France, and French television are trudging back to work.
We can look forward to some good programmes - and good listening extracts in the months to come

But we start the month with our old favourite Comment c'est fait. This one is slightly macabre - sculpting the reconstitution of the face of a crime victim. It's not industrial, and the lack of specialist vocabulary makes this a modest level-1

I wasn't going to use this as an extract because, linguistically, it is just a very clear voice over. But the images are beautiful, as indeed is  the French. There is even some interesting vocabulary. You don't often come across sentences such as

cette escarbille qui tournoie dans la lueur rémanent du Big Bang in every day French

Every so often I record a snippet of Télématin, the France 2 breakfast show. Here is the sort of travel brochure piece that you either rather enjoy, or seriously detest. No matter, I was looking for something a little above the basic level-1, and the voices, and especially the references to names and places, give us that very well

This month I'm trying to increase the level of difficulty for each clip progressively. This extract from the evening current affairs chat show C'est dans l'air offers us a range of voices - as always, the very clear voice over, but then the voices of the interviewees, finishing with an enthusiastic young historian who speaks quite quickly

Here's a Comment c'est fait with plenty of new vocabulary. If you always wanted to know how to say 'disposable nozzle' in French - don't miss this !

This made me laugh enormously. Les hommes viennent de Mars, les femmes de Vénus was a very successful one-man show by a Belgian comic, Paul Dewandre. I am very grateful to Paul who sent me the clip

I often praise the quality of TF1's news reporting to the skies. This one is on the differences in price of school equipment, in between the very cheap and the expensive. If I understood the piece, it turns out that thanks to the competitiveness of French supermarkets, you can get good quality stuff for your child at quite low prices. And of course the very cheapest products don't last very long.

Now tell, me again, TF1, just what is the problem ?

Here is the perfect example of the extract which promises to be easy and turns out to be really rather difficult. Patch Adams is a film starring Robin Williams who turns this feel-good movie into something worth watching. But it also turns out to be a good listening exercise.

Les enquêtes de Murdoch  is a Canadian series, but not French-Canadian - the voices are dubbed. It's a sort of Canadian Inspector Barnaby, in fact. And extremely useful for the student of French.

As  you will have realised I use Comment c'est fait a lot. The listening challenge is quite different to the majority of other extracts on this site. The voice-over is always clear, but the trick is to recognise words which are often technical or slightly unusual. And these extracts often give me difficulty. I can be happily tapping away transcribing something that is a very modest level-2, and then I hear a word which completely throws me. And that's it for the next half-hour...

TF1 news likes to get away from the unpleasant realities of politics from time to time. Here is a nice little piece on the restoration the Château of Versailles

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