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: “Nos Villes d’Origine”
This week, we’re introducing a new “shout out” segment in “A bit of French” to thank all you Kwizzers who left us 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 reminiscing about the towns/villages where we grew up: Louargat in Brittany for Céline, and Gallardon in the Beauce region for Aurélie 😊 To learn more about the interesting specificities and must-see places of Gallardon and Louargat, listen to our podcast below. Bonne écoute !
🔠 Vocabulary Pit Stop
Here’s some useful vocabulary featured in this podcast for you to learn and/or review:
- pareil ! = same!
- faire un coucou à [quelqu’un] = to give a wave/shout out to [someone]
- à partir de maintenant = from now on
- valonné(e) = hilly
- agricole = agricultural
- une région céréalière = a cereal-growing region
- “le grenier de la France” = “the granary of France”
- un champ de blé / de colza = a wheat / rapeseed field
- à perte de vue = as far as the eye can see
- défiler = pass by/go by
- apaisant(e) = soothing
- déprimant(e) = depressing
- une allée de boules = a court to play Breton boules
- la pétanque = the most popular and formalised version of a boules game
- le cochonnet = jack/target ball used in boules games
- le bowling = bowling
- le gravier = gravel/pebbles
- un schéma = a pattern/a model
- valoir le coup d’œil = to be worth a look
- un donjon féodal = a feudal dungeon
- un pan de [quelque chose] = a panel/section of [something]
- un panorama sur la campagne alentour = a panorama of the surrounding countryside
- un chemin de randonnée = a hiking trail
- le patron local = the local patron saint
- un clin d’œil = a wink (literally)/a reference (figuratively)
- un évêque = bishop
- chamailler [quelqu’un] = to bicker with/bother [someone]
- frapper [quelqu’un] de cessité = to strike [someone] with blindness
- faire jaillir une fontaine = to magic up a fountain
- se venger de [quelqu’un] = to get revenge on [someone]
- un périple = a journey (adventurous)
Proper Nouns:
- La Bretagne (Brittany, northwestern French region)
- Les Côtes-d’Armor (one of Brittany’s departments)
- La région Centre-Val de Loire (inland region in central France)
- L’Eure-et-Loir (French department of the Centre-Val de Loire region)
- La Beauce (vast agricultural region in north-central France)
- Le Ménez Bré et Le Ménez Hoguéné (neighbouring mountains in the Côtes-d’Armor)
- L’école primaire Émile Pottier (Gallardon’s primary school)
- le collège Val-de-Voise (Gallardon’s secondary school, by the Voise River)
- Chartres (prefecture of the Eure-et-Loir department)
- Versailles / Paris (French cities)
- L’église Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul (Gallardon’s church)
- l’Épaule de Gallardon (Gallardon’s medieval tower, literally “the Shoulder of Gallardon”)
- La Guerre de Cent Ans (the Hundred Years’ War)
- La Chapelle Saint-Hervé (chapel at the top of the Ménez Bré)
- Le chemin de randonnée GR34 (a 2,000 km long hiking trail along the coast of Brittany)
🤩 NEW: 2 Special Fill-in-the-Blanks exercises
Want to spend a bit more time in Gallardon and Louargat with us, while practising some of your French grammar? Then you’re going to love these 2 Fill-in-the-Blanks exercises 😍:
🙉 Peux-tu entendre cette phrase ?
Ready for a little challenge? Listen out for this sentence taken from the podcast:
“C’était le Château de Gallardon fortifié, qui a été détruit au moment de la Guerre de Cent Ans avec les Anglais… ce que le maire de Gallardon ne s’est pas gêné de mentionner à mon mariage franco-britannique.”
To help you practise your grammar, test yourself with this special Notebook comprising the following Kwiziq lessons related to this sentence:
- Conjugate être in the imperfect tense in French
- Qui = Who/which/that
- Conjugate être (+ avoir) in the compound past in French
- Ce que (vs ce qui) = what/which
- Conjugate reflexive verbs (+être) in the compound past in French
- Common mistakes with mon/ma/mes, ton/ta/tes and son/sa/ses
✏️ More practice! More!
Want to practise your French knowledge on this topic? Have a go at these home-related Kwiziq exercises:
- Dictée (Premium subscribers only) – Un coup de fil de la maison (C1)
- Dictée (Premium subscribers only) – Quitter la maison (B1)
- Bilingual Article – Georges Brassens et la ville de Sète (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.
🤗 À vous de jouer !
Now it’s your turn to speak/write! Let us know about your home towns/cities/villages. Were they nice? What’s to see? Where to go? Share your own memories and anecdotes in the comments below – et en français bien sûr ! We can’t wait to read you!
À bientôt les Kwizzers !
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.