French Conversation Podcast
In “A Bit of French with A&C” podcast series, you’ll listen to Kwiziq superstars Aurélie and Céline‘s light-hearted chats in French about fun (and random) topics. To help you practise your listening skills, these podcasts will be accompanied by some useful vocab, grammar lessons, and interesting links to go further! Bonne écoute !
🎧🎃 Today’s podcast: “Les Choses qui font Peur”
First of all, thank you so much for your lovely comments on the previous podcasts: please keep leaving us feedback and contributing your own anecdotes, we love reading you! 🥰
In today’s podcast, A&C (that’s us!) are celebrating the Halloween season with a spooky talk about scary things and creatures – boooooo! What scares us in real life and in fiction? Do you know about the terrifying creatures of Francophone folklore like Baron Samedi, l’Ankou and la Bête du Gévaudan ? To find out the answer to these questions, listen to our podcast below… if you dare 😈 Bonne écoute !
🔠🧛♂️ Vocabulary Pit Stop
Here’s some useful vocabulary featured in this podcast for you to learn and/or review:
- être fan de [quelque chose] = to be a fan of/to be keen on [something]
- surmonter [quelque chose] = to overcome [something]
- une phobie = a phobia
- la peur du vide / le vertige = fear of heights [lit. fear of the void]
- rien que [faire]… = just [doing]…
- un clown tueur = a killer clown
- se faire mordre = to get bitten
- viscéral(e) = visceral
- ça me fout la trouille (familier) = it gives me the jitters
- un objet inanimé = an inanimate object
- prendre vie = to come to life
- possédé(e) = possessed
- diabolique = diabolical
- les paillettes = glitter
- foutre les chocottes (familier) = to give one the heebie-jeebies
- une âme sensible = a softy [lit. a sensitive soul]
- je te l’accorde = I’ll give you that
- le vaudou louisianais/haïtien = Louisianan/Haïtian voodoo
- faire le lien = to make the link
- un lwa = a spirit in the Haïtian voodoo religion
- emblématique = iconic
- un chapeau haut-de-forme = a top hat
- un défunt = a deceased person
- sur le point de [faire] = about to [do]
- squelettique = skeletal
- lugubre = gloomy
- les guenilles = rags
- une faux = a scythe
- faucher [quelque chose] = to reap [something]
- une charette = a cart (old)
- grincer = to creak
- éviter à tout prix = to avoid at all costs
- un panthéon = hall of fame [lit. pantheon]
- un loup-garou = a werewolf
- participer de [quelque chose] = to contribute to [something]
Proper Nouns:
- une Cadillac (American car)
- “Entretien avec un vampire” (“Interview with the vampire” – Anne Rice’s novel / Neil Jordan’s 1994 movie)
- La Nouvelle Orléans (New Orleans)
- Le Baron Samedi (Baron Samedi or Baron Saturday, voodoo spirit)
- L’Ankou (Personification of Death in Breton, Cornish, and Welsh folklore)
- La Bête du Gévaudan (The Beast of Gevaudan, a man-eating creature or creatures that terrorised the Gévaudan province of France)
- le Gévaudan / la Lozère (French department – old and current names)
- “Le Chien des Baskerville” (“The Hound of the Baskervilles” – a Sherlock Holmes novel)
🙉👻 Peux-tu entendre cette phrase ?
Ready for a little challenge? Listen out for this sentence taken from the podcast:
“Et justement, il y a un personnage du vaudou haïtien qui fait partie de ces créatures mythiques qui font peur : le fameux Baron Samedi […]”
To help you practise your grammar, here’s a list of Kwiziq lessons related to this sentence:
- Forming regular adverbs with “-ment” in French (French Adverbs)
- Il y a = There is/There are in French
- Adjectives of nationalities vary depending on gender in French (French Adjectives)
- Qui = Who/which/that (French Relative Pronouns)
- Faire partie de = To be part of (French Expressions with faire)
- Ce/cet/cette and ces = this/that and these/those (French Demonstrative Adjectives)
- Faire peur (à) = To scare someone (French Expressions with faire)
✏️🧌 More practice! More!
Want to practise your French knowledge on this topic? Have a go at these spooky Kwiziq exercises:
- Dictée (Premium subscribers only) – La bête du Gévaudan (B2)
- Writing Challenge (Premium subscribers only) – I’m scared! (A1)
- Bilingual Article – 3 Légendes de Bretagne (C1)
Not Premium yet? Now’s a great time to upgrade! You’ll get unlimited exercises, kwizzes and multiple notebooks to help you stay organised and make progress faster, plus Weekend Workouts exercises every week.
📖☠️ Going further
A&C have mentioned 3 fascinating figures of Francophone folklore in this podcast. If they sparked your curiosity and you’d like to learn more about them, have a look at their Wikipedia pages:
🤗🧟♀️ À vous de jouer !
Now it’s your turn to speak/write! Share with us your own scary bug bears and other terrifying creatures from your country or region in the comments below – en français bien sûr ! We can’t wait to read you!
Allez, à bientôt, et n’ayez pas (trop) peur !
Author info
Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since. She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!
For over ten years now, Céline has been teaching French and Italian to students of all ages and abilities in the UK. This French native speaker comes from Brittany, and likes crafts, Breton dance (of course!) and Breton music which she actually played for four years. She also has a fondness for European cinema and British History.