The podcast has existed since November 2006, over 18 years, with nearly 2,500 episodes published.

 

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The Constraints

When I created it, I had very strong material constraints: a one-year-old baby (Micaela), a job (in publishing), and days that were too short. These constraints have only persisted, even eighteen years later: I'm married, I have three daughters, an intense sporting activity, I love reading, and going out in Paris. These constraints gave me a framework for the podcast: a short format, based on my daily life so I wouldn't have to invent content, a rhythm of three times a week to allow me to offer several anecdotes. It's this format that gave the podcast its title: telling one thing from my day.

[Listen to how it started →]

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Writing Day by Day

From the beginning, I've been writing day by day. I choose my topics from what happened to me a few days before or sometimes the same day. It's not always very comfortable and a bit risky, but that's what makes it an adventure. It's also what gives the podcast its personality, this logbook feel, because the podcast literally follows my life, the seasons, my travels, my encounters. I think this is why the podcast is in perpetual renewal: it's the way I look at my daily life that offers me topics. The podcast is not artificial in any way; I don't invent.

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Writing: An Essential Asset

Spontaneously, you might think that the fact that episodes are written and then recorded distances them from the natural side of spoken French. After all, a living language is mostly spoken, rather than written. 

 

In reality, writing is almost the main asset of this podcast. An essential asset for learning French. Writing is essential on several levels. First, I take great care with my sentences and their syntax: there are short sentences, long sentences, simple sentences, complex sentences, sentences with complicated tenses, all kinds of sentences. There are also parts of dialogues, which allow me to report conversations. 

Oral French is very interesting, but the syntax is very different orally, and it is more interesting to know how to construct a sentence correctly to speak, express your opinion, or tell a story that happened to you, than to learn from sentences from spontaneous speech. 

 

Finally, the writing is not artificial; these are not textbook sentences. Yes, textbook sentences can also have their charm, their interest, but one should not limit oneself to encountering them, because their contexts are limited. You progress a lot and quickly by noticing how sentences are constructed, how vocabulary is used in context. And so, you progress well by listening to well-written sentences. You progress in oral comprehension, but also in sentence patterns that become instinctive through being heard repeatedly. 

You need to be inspired and copy to learn.

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Encounters with People Who Live in France

For several years now, I have also been sharing my encounters with you in the form of interviews. These are people I contact because I want to meet them. I prepare my interviews based on questions I have about their activity or their approach. I meet them in person, I go to their workplace or to a café. 

I think the encounters, in the form of interviews, bring a lot to listeners because they allow them to meet people they would not have known otherwise, who live or work in France, but also to hear people other than me speak and thus get their ears used to different ways of speaking, formulations, or rhythms. So it's enriching in many ways. And, on my side, I love meeting people. Even though I am convinced that listening to the same person speak often is extremely beneficial for then understanding others. A lot of work is already done, and the surplus of adaptation is less significant for your brain.

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The Transcript and Notes That Are Not Lessons

I am not a French teacher (fortunately) and therefore the notes that accompany the transcript are not lessons. However, French is the language in which I live, in which I think, in which I write, and what I find interesting is to show you what is natural or useful for you as a learner. This is the approach that drives the transcript notes and which means that there are often useful phrases taken from the text and given as examples. 

And I really like the idea of playing with French: that's why there are often suggestions for exercises to do with the podcast text. The summer period is often an opportunity to play guessing games around monuments or historical figures. The notes are a living complement to a more formal course, to grammar lessons, to formatted things. This makes learning more "lively" when learning alone.

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Slow French

Many listeners of One Thing In a French Day have told me that the beginnings were difficult, that they couldn't understand, but that little by little their understanding improved and they now measure their progress. However, I think some others have thrown in the towel, that it's too fast, too difficult at the beginning, and that it can be off-putting and discouraging. That's why I created a Slow French version of the podcast: Cultivate Your French. 

 

Once a week, I present an episode in Slow French. In Cultivate Your French episodes, I read the text a first time slowly and then you hear it at normal speed. This means that in the same episode, you can decipher the text, understand the words, and then hear the normal speed version. I record both versions myself. 

 

In no way do I keep you in an artificial bubble of Slow comprehension. The idea of possible progress in comprehension is there right away. Slow is not just slow French, it's a state of mind, we take our time, we're not in a race to learn. With one episode per week, we give ourselves a dose of French, we discover things around the subject being treated, we open up perspectives, we find new learning goals, we renew our enthusiasm for the language and culture.