Challenge #6

Today, I would like to offer you something playful and fun. Something that doesn’t require you to remember grammatical rules or take into account numerous exceptions, while allowing you to greatly improve your pronunciation and, above all, the flow of your French speech.

Today, I want to ask you to sing in French!

This is a method I personally used when I was learning English, and still use to learn Italian.

Why sing in French?

First of all, singing a song you like is a hundred times more fun than practicing your diction with a pencil stuck between your teeth! And let’s be honest, learning French is not always easy. So it’s important to have fun doing it, otherwise you won’t be able to keep up your learning over the long term.

Secondly, when we sing, we have to respect a certain rhythm, a certain speed. At first, it’s difficult to say all the words at the same time as the singer, but this forces us to progress and learn to pronounce these words more naturally, more fluidly.

A gateway to Quebec culture

Songs are a gateway to culture in any country. Of course, all languages have songs with a universal theme, such as “I love you, don’t leave me” or “you’re gone, get lost”. But beyond that, I’m convinced that a song is an excellent way of learning about a people’s culture.

This is valuable, because although it’s easy to take language or history classes, culture is generally something that’s experienced more than learned from books.

And believe me, when you are in a crowd at a summer festival and can sing with more than 50,000 people, you’ll feel included like never before!

Loco Locass, a rap group from Quebec, advocates the fact that it’s our adherence to culture and language that makes us Québécois, not our origins, religion or place of birth, and frankly, I think they’re right. Here’s their song that sums it up very well. As this band says, ” Quebecers unite under the fleur de lys”.

A selection of songs from Québec

For this exercise, you can choose any song in French, but I wanted to suggest a few artists from Quebec.

I’ve tried to include a bit of everything: from love songs to rock, from recent songs to timeless classics. 

If you click on the song title, you’ll get the lyrics. I’ve also included a link to the video clip.

On va s’aimer encore – Vincent Vallières

Oublie-moi – Coeur de Pirate

Miss Blumenfeld – Claudia Bouvette

Marine Marchande – Les Cowboys Fringants

They don’t have a video clip, but here’s the song live

Illégal – Corbeau

This song is too old to have a video clip

Your challenge: Sing!

As you can guess, your challenge is to sing a song in French! You can write in the comments which one you’ve chosen and why.

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