Le Challenge
| November 2011 The video extracts on this page represent many hours of work for a lot of people - for it's here that I offer, every six months or so a real listening challenge. I attach my own - incomplete - transcription, and I leave it for a couple of months to let you email in to me your versions. Sometimes a seriously bright student deciphers the whole lot. Sometimes I call on my French friends to help. So here is the latest.. See how you do with the video clip and the audio only version, which is necessary if you are going to rewind a lot. November 2011, a French friend sent me an email with a link to a video clip which he said showed the accent of his region l'Auvergne. This was Les Bodin's, and their sketch Face de Bouc. I thought it was perfect for this page .. very, very funny, and very, very hard. I picked up enough to enjoy the humour, but as always, there are many errors and a few gaps. But trying to fill in those gaps is how we learn, and wanting to understand and be able to laugh with the audience is the motivation As always you get the video, this time with subtitles, my initial text and the indispensable audio only version
Les Bodin's : Face de Bouc
And here is the audio only version Send your version to : admin@sonsenfrancais.org
In December 2010, France 2 screened a two hour interview with Céline Dion. It was just a few days before she gave birth to twins, after a long and frustrating process of IVF. So you can guess the subject of conversation... Her interviewer was the Canadian Julie Snyder and the broadcast was made originally for the Quebec channel TVA. What that means is that these two ladies are using their natural, and very strong, Canadian accents. I admire Céline Dion enormously as a singer, but I have to admit that her accent I find funny - especially when she gets excited, which is most of the time.
Here is the video. Right-click the picture to download
And here is the audio only version Send your version to : admin@sonsenfrancais.org
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| July 2010 One thing I've learned over five years of running this site, is that the more it hurts, the more good it does you. I have a big folder of extracts that I've given up on. Too hard. Too many holes in the transcription. But - of course - it's the effort to understand that forces the brain to improve it's capacity to make sense out of data which arrives too fast, too indistinct, mixed with background noise and music. One such was a comedy sketch by Chantal Ladesou. Very often in a comedy sketch there is a clear narration. The comic is telling a story and that helps us infer the missing words. However, this lady's humour is quite eccentric and the 'story' less clear. And of course her delivery is very fast, and she slurs her words enormously. So it's a wonderful exercise, but very difficult, very discouraging, and rather depressing when the audience laughs because they have followed the joke - and you haven't. As I've often noted, with comedy, the voice often speeds up or becomes indistinct just at the moment of the punch-line - it's a game between the comic and his audience So here is the sketch. As with the first Challenge, I am not going to provide the text immediately - see how you do, and email me the results on
Click (or right click to download) the picture for the video And here is the audio only version. Useful if you're going to rewind a lot Here is the correct version... and my sincere thanks to Matthew, who put in a lot of work to correct all the mistakes |
| While you're
pondering over the diction of Mme Ladesou, here's another difficult
exercise. A friend sent me a comedy series called
Hero Corp,
because we were talking on Skype about humour, the influence of Monthy
Python etc.. It's a good illustration of how hard it is to judge the difficulty of particular extract for someone who does not speak our language. If you're an English speaker, you don't find English or American comics or actors hard to follow. Why should it be difficult for people who are learning English ? But it is. In this extract the humour is off-the-wall, déjanté, the ideas jump around and are hard to follow. The dialogue is natural, fast, there is background music and sound effects. Making a transcription is frustrating - but good exercise. If you can fill any of the (many) holes in this transcription, email me your version. It's a funny programme, I'd love to be able to follow it better |
The previous challenge
| Patrick Sabatier hosts an occasional
series calles Les Stars du Rire. The last one was a sparkler, and I
have already quoted the sketch of Frank Dubosc
from it
But it was the impersonator Gerald Dahan who really blew me away. He did three songs in the style of three different singers - and of course on the subject of Nicolas Sarkozy. A technical tour de force that we've seen before from Thierry le Luron I offered this page originally as a challenge to the ear, because the songs are particularly difficult to follow A word on the linguistic interest. The first song, parodying Brel, La Valse du Président is a patter song. Very fast but pretty clear. We have to persuade our brains to keep up with the pace. Here is the original. You can find the words here. (click the picture for the video )
Here is a little sequence of comedy songs, starting with Jean Poiret who has his own take on La valse à mille temps (click the upper half of picture for the video and the lower half for the text)
The others are more difficult, because indistinct, particularly the second, which is based on Aznavours Emmenez-moi. (Youtube clip)
The third is Gainsbourg Le poinçonneur des LIlas and here is a snippet of the original. Find the words here (Youtube link) (click the picture for the video )
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Click (or right click to download) the top of the picture for the video and the bottom for the text And here is the audio only version. Useful if you're going to rewind a lot And here is the Flash version to watch in the browser
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