OffQc | Québécois French Guide

The new OffQc book about contractions is ready for purchase. It’s called Contracted French, and you can buy and download it here immediately in the OffQc store in PDF format, along with the mp3 audio files that accompany it.

Part of the reason you have trouble understanding spoken French is due to a lack of awareness of contractions. In school, you learned to say je suis, tu es, il est, and so on. But, during the course of a normal conversation, you’ll hear j’su’, t’es and y’est, which sound as though they were written in French chu, té and yé.

Without knowledge of contractions, a lot of what you hear in spoken French will remain off limits to you. You might even feel as though people are speaking a secret language — and you’re not allowed in.

Do you know how francophones might pronounce je suis allé in a normal, everyday conversation? What about dans la vie? Or il n’y a plus de lait? Or je ne suis pas sûr?

In Contracted French, we’ll look at how these and other common words and sample phrases contract in spoken French.

I’ve divided this book into fifteen chapters, each one focusing on a set of related contractions that you need to know to understand spoken French. In each chapter, you’ll see different contracted words and phrases highlighted in blue — I’ve recorded these highlighted items in mp3 files. (It’s my voice.) Each chapter also contains exercises to complete; the exercises come with an answer key in the back of the book so you can check your work. I’ve also recorded the entire answer key so you can listen to it too.

Below are sample pages.

Table of contents

Do you recognise the building? I took all the photos in this book in (or near) Old Montréal and the Old Port.

Introduction

Audio list

The recordings are spread out over five mp3 files. Each file is roughly five minutes in length and consists of a reading of the contracted words and phrases that appear in the chapters and answer key. (In the screen shot above, the time within brackets isn’t the duration; it’s the position of the item within the track so you can locate it.)

Random pages from the chapters

Random pages from the answer key

As usual, you can buy this book in the OffQc store (follow link below). Payment is by credit card or PayPal.

After you pay for this item, you’ll need to download 6 files:

• the book in PDF format (1 file)
• the audio tracks in mp3 format (5 files)

Buy and download Contracted French here in the OffQc store