Improve your French listening comprehension with this clip from the Balades podcast. It’s 30 words in 14 seconds, how many can you hear and understand?
This clip is from Balades Episode 1. Listen and fill in what you hear below. Read more and find a translation below. Listen to the full podcast here.
Why this section?
This snippet picks up just after the previous snippet from Balades.
Again, the speaker Isabelle has a relatively easy pace and clear pronunciation, making this perfect for a beginner such as myself.
I love this snippet because it’s the core speaking you should be doing in any beginner lesson of French. In fact most textbooks start with just this – how to introduce yourself, tell me about your parents, where are you from. And voilà!
While this content does make up 100% of the first unit of just about every elementary textbook, how much could you understand if you were tossed into CDG or you’re trying to meet a stranger at Les Halles.
How much of this snippet are you understanding?
Can you only hear the articles or are you catching keywords?
There’s absolutely no way that I could get through an entire podcast in French without melting my brain, that’s why I broke it up into snippets like this. Join me for the next snippet.
The snippet in English
Find a translation of this snippet here, how much of this did you hear?
Je m’appelle Isabelle et j’habite près de Zurich où j’ai aussi grandi. Mon père est suisse et ma mère est française. J’ai donc la double nationalité : française et suisse.
My name is Isabelle and I live near Zurich where I also grew up. My father is Swiss and my mother is French. So I have dual nationality: French and Swiss.
The above text courtesy of Google Translate.
What does “j’ai donc la double nationalité” mean in French?
“J’ai donc la double nationalité” means “I therefore have dual citizenship” in English. It is a phrase used to express the idea that the person has the citizenship of two different countries. “J’ai” means “I have” in English, “donc” means “therefore” or “so” and “la double nationalité” means “dual citizenship” in English.
This phrase is used to indicate that someone holds citizenship in two different countries, either through birth, naturalization, or other legal means. It is a way to express that someone has the right to live, work and travel freely in two different countries.
According to data from the French Ministry of Interior, as of 2021, there were around 4.5 million people in France with dual citizenship. This represents around 7% of the total population of France. This number is likely to continue to grow as more and more people are becoming eligible for dual citizenship through naturalization or by the fact that more and more countries are allowing dual citizenship.
Note that these numbers are estimates and can change depending on the year and the sources. Additionally, the number of dual citizens in France is influenced by a number of factors such as immigration policies, the number of people applying for dual citizenship, the number of people who are eligible for dual citizenship, etc.
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