15 households got together to protest about our recent village contretemps by way of formal letter to the mayor. My non-French OH was asked if he would draft it.
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Accents are charming and not something to worry about.
Even native speakers have accents. It is something that a speaker can learn to eliminate but requires time and effort and quite a lot of physical exercise. Done for acting occasionally but with varying results that are open to criticism. It used to be a thing for speakers of English with rural accents to work in losing them in preference of ‘received English’. In my opinion, loses character and honesty. Unless of course someone has serious reasons for needing to hide their origins.
Language fluency and articulacy require losing one’s accent. To concentrate on that would be a misdirection.
The elder son of my lone English student asked me if his French accent in English was very bad. I told him that to English ears a French accent is very charming and not to worry at all. The goal of his language learning is to be understood by others, not to pretend he is someone else.
As a teacher and proper lady I left out the bit about French accents (and Italian!) being sexy to English ears. Incidentally, who hasn’t been told they sound like Jane Birkin? English accents may also be sexy to French ears!
Moi 
Dell boy maybe
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Met a French girl. Fell in love. Got her pregnant.
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My biggest problem is understanding spoken French. My written isn’t too bad. I found this chap, Hugo, on YouTube. The channel is called Inner French. It’s intermediate level and he speaks clearly, explaining the more difficulty phrases, in French. I’m starting to hear the words, rather than just a blur!
He does a free Podcast as well, also called Inner French. I get it through Spotify.
Btw, if you watch a YouTube video on a tablet, you can slow it down or speed it up in the app.
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You can do that on the site too.
Thanks for the link - I’ll take a look.
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He was English, from the North-East in fact.
That’s what made it so unusual, I think.
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We heard someone speaking French with a very broad sowf lundun accent. Curious… 
And for a bit of comic relief, there’s also this on YouTube…
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There are a few more to add to Hugo:
https://www.youtube.com/@LefrancaisbyAlex
https://www.youtube.com/@francaisauthentique
https://www.youtube.com/@FrancaisavecPierre
https://www.youtube.com/@FrancaisAvecFred
https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchmorningswithElisa
https://www.youtube.com/@francaisavecnelly
https://www.youtube.com/@madameapaname
I reckon all the above are around B2 (but honestly, I don’t know: maybe one of the teachers might comment). The chap below grades his material:
https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput
All of these speak clearly. It’s a bit artificial, of course, but it allows you to hear a variety of delivery.
For me, one of the key things is to concentrate on what I’m listening to. I’m not very good at that on a screen.
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Brilliant!
Just as an aside - it’s B1 level for naturalisation, not B2 and it doesn’t have to be DELF. However, if it’s not DELF but rather the more common certificate, it will probably have to be redone during the naturalisation process as it only remains vaid for 2 years. Being a diploma, DEFL lasts indefinititely.
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Same here, I can get by in Swiss German areas because I have had clients in the past who insisted on speaking to me in their version of German during business meetings (which might have been a bit mean, I suppose, given that I was with a mainly French-speaking contingent from the other business units). I certainly wouldn’t claim that I understood everything that was said to me. Fortunately, the Alpine German speaking areas all have a certain familiarity and turn of phrase to them, whether it is Tyrolean, Innsbrücker, Allgäuer or Zürcher. It also reminds me of the time I spent a whole day as the minute-taker in an adversarial hearing listening to a Swiss-German attorney arguing about why his client’s patent absolutely was novel and inventive over the prior art, and why the opponent’s arguments were total rubbish. I felt like I’d gone through several washing machines at the end of the day. The Bavarian chairman and Prussian second member of the panel had both come over at the end to check on my sanity and to cheer me up for having kept up with what they both thought was an extraordinarily unclear formulation of the arguments, rife with “local colour” expressions.
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On this subject, I wonder if anyone found the website which is interactive - designed and deals with pronunciation? I lost the link when some numpty threw out our old computer, but didn’t keep the hard drive.
The website was wonderful… the word or phrase or whole sentence was shown, spoken and you would then attempt to repeat it perfectly…and a graph illustrated your performance. Each letter was explained as to the exact position of the tongue, for example… It was such a brilliant site and I can not for the life of me remember its name. It may have been through the University languages department. I will have another hunt and let you all know. In the meantime, there is this site:
https://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/page/get-started
Reading this thread depresses me slightly….all these websites, podcasts and YouTube videos.
Can’t you just talk to people?!
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glad you said that… I thought it was just me…
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Back in UK… we would try and talk to one another in french… OH was better after a couple of glasses… and I tried not to fall asleep… … but at least we were talking…
and listening to French radio and trying to answer the questions… got the brain going… took a long time for me to get a correct answer… felt as if I’d won the pools
Over here… we are lucky to be able to talk to someone/everyone every day… the joys of village life…
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Surely the point of practising using “websites, podcasts and YouTube videos.” is so that it is possible to “just talk to people”.
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One needs to find the right recipe and we’re all so different… we did use Michel Thomas discs for a couple of years back in UK… had them on in the car whenever we were out and about… just as background noise… it helped.
If I’m with someone (even OH) conversation is spontaneous… depending on what catstrophy/exciting event is happening…
Even telling him I’ve ruined the toast… sounds more musical in French…
I have encountered quite a lot of foreigners on our trips round France and our gîte clients who have obviously spent time learning vocabulary and grammar, can even read complex text, but can’t actually answer questions or hold any sort of conversation. And can’t cope with normal speed speech.
It seems to me that only learning in an artificial environment squashes one’s natural instincts. So the focus is on getting the grammar right, rather than communicating and they end up not speaking at all!
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