Improve your ear for French with advertisements. This snippet from an SNCF advert is 17 words in 13 seconds, how many can you hear & understand?
This clip is from SNCF advert “Pour Nous Tous”. Listen and fill in what you hear below. Read more and find a translation below. Listen to the full ad here.
The above audio sample and transcription is from SNCF advert “Pour Nous Tous”. We do not own the content. See the full ad here.
But above all, big complainers
I found this ad on Youtube and wanted to share it. It’s like spoken word set to train track beat talking about the French. An interesting take as a learner looking to dive into the culture.
I’ve broken it up into pretty small pieces, so take a listen and follow along as I go through it. One of the things I like about it is it takes the positive and negative together, and the negative as a positive. At least that’s my read as a foreigner. Even the title I’ve grabbed for this post, would be something negative. And “big mouths” grande gueule or grand de gueule is a negative expression. I recently learned telling someone to shut up uses the word gueule, as in the mouth of an animal. It’s not a great expression, here this artist is almost reclaiming it.
I’m sure there might be a pun or two in here, by calling it “grands de gueule” instead of grandes gueules – which would be the plural, I believe? At any rate, still listen for the various grand(e/s).
Here’s the full ad for your reference, but follow along over the coming “lessons” as we dive into it.
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The snippet in English
Find a translation of this snippet here, how much of this did you hear?
Créatifs et inventeurs, grands artistes. Grands féministes, grands de gueule, grand de cœur mais surtout grands râleurs.
Creatives and inventors, great artists. Great feminists, big mouths, big hearts, but above all great grumblers.
The above translation from Deepl. Source
What words did I look up in this snippet?
Find keywords for this snippet below
grands de gueule
mais surtout
râleurs
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