OffQc | Québécois French Guide

Take responsibility for your learning

Here’s just one possible daily routine you can set up to get you closer to your goals. I’ve written this routine with intermediate learners in mind who don’t have daily contact with francophones and who struggle with understanding the spoken language. But even if you’re at a lower level in French, the sooner you start exposing yourself to genuine spoken French the better. Remain positive by focusing on what you do understand rather than what you don’t.

If you speak with francophones for several hours every day, you can disregard all of the listening suggestions I’ve made here. Speaking with real people in large doses is always preferable to any other listening method. Of course, you can always add in these suggestions to help round out your skills, or just for pleasure.

This daily routine is for people who want to make real effort. You will need to make the time to implement it if you want to make progress. It will require two hours a day of you. (I did say it was for people who want to make real effort!) Of course, if you have even more time to dedicate to French, then you can increase the time recommendations I’ve made below as much as you’d like.

You can also decrease the time if necessary, but I’m sure you know that the less time you spend with the language, the slower your progress will be and the less momentum you’ll gain.

The emphasis here is on listening, not reading. Reading is important (as you’ll see in the last step), but if you want to make real progress in conversational French, then you’ll probably want to increase the time you’re exposed to conversational French!

One final note: Everything here is just a suggestion. You can use this page for ideas only, if you like. Or you can decide that nothing here interests you and go about things your own way! You’re in control of your own learning, so do what’s best for you.

60 minutes of watching television

Spend one hour a day of watching television programming from Quebec. Ideally, you will pick programming that uses conversational Quebec French. It is important to listen to conversational French to get used to hearing speakers talk in a natural way and so that you can model yourself on them. You’ll hear natural voice intonation, see facial expressions, and receive other contextual clues.

If you’re in Quebec or anywhere else in Canada, go to tou.tv and watch Les Parent, 30 vies and La Galère. These are the best shows using conversational Quebec French that are available on tou.tv at the time of publishing this.

If you’re outside Canada, many of the shows on tou.tv will be restricted. However, some programming there is accessible outside Canada: look for the green circle in the A-Z list. You can also check out Télé-Mag Québec. There are hundreds of videos here that you can watch from outside Canada. (I’m always on the look-out for better stuff for out-of-country viewers and I’ll update this section as I make new discoveries.) Alternatively, increase as necessary the number of minutes you spend listening to the radio described in the next section.

And if all else fails, look for some series on DVD and watch the episodes not once but many, many times. I recommend 19-2, Les Parent, La Galère, Tout sur moi, C.A., Trauma, François en série, Rumeurs, Les Invincibles. Look for them online at Renaud-Bray and Archambault.

30 minutes of radio

Listening to the radio is a very useful way to improve your listening comprehension and speaking skills, but it’s very often overlooked.

By listening to the radio, you’ll train yourself to pay attention to French with fewer contextual clues. You may find listening to the radio tiring at first because of this. If this is the case, start with fewer minutes then work up to 30.

No matter where in the world you are, you can listen online to 98,5 fm from Montreal. On weekdays, the programming is all talk. Most of the talk deals with current events, but the style of language used is conversational.

This is excellent for you in two ways — you’ll listen to a natural way of speaking and keep up with issues of interest to the Québécois at the same time.

If you live outside of Canada and are having real trouble finding good conversational French from Quebec to listen to, then increase the amount of time you spend listening to this radio station accordingly. I can’t stress enough how useful this radio is — I have seen some learners make phenomenal progress in French after listening to it in a dedicated way.

By the way, just having the radio on in the background probably doesn’t count towards your 30 minutes! It doesn’t hurt to do that, but what I’m encouraging you to do here is to spend 30 dedicated minutes to active listening (in other words, try to pay attention, okay?).

30 minutes of reading about current events

If you’ve followed the routine up to this point, you’ll have spent 90 minutes listening to French. Consider completing the last 30 minutes of your two-hour routine by reading about current events.

Why current events? You’ll probably want to know how to talk about what’s going on in the world around you. You’ll increase your vocabulary by reading about current events, and you’ll also absorb a large amount of vocabulary related to specific fields of activity in Quebec, such as government, education, sports, and so on.

You can read any online news source from Quebec that you like. If you don’t know where to begin, give Le Devoir from Montreal a try.

Please do consider this step. Even if you speak to francophones every day in large doses, this step is still worth considering. Strive to understand the world in which Quebec French is used.

You can do it

Reaching a high degree of proficiency in conversational Quebec French is most certainly within your grasp if you’re serious and consistent, and if you approach it with the right attitude of curiosity and excitement.

Oh, and, if you find it hard to dedicate two hours a day to French, you may just have to start waking up a little earlier!…