Asking for Directions

You can ask a perfect question in French and still end up on the wrong street, because the hard part is the answer coming back at you. This conversation trains both halves at once.

Where this conversation takes you

A visitor loses her way in a French town and a passerby talks her through it, first on foot and then onto a bus. You pick up dozens of useful words and phrases for admitting you are lost, naming the place you want to reach, checking how far it is, and holding on to instructions built around tout droit, à gauche and à droite. The second half moves to the bus stop, where lines, tickets and knowing where to get off take over. It is the vocabulary you reach for the moment you come out of a station in Lyon or Bordeaux with a flat phone battery.

How the practice works

The conversation is split into short quizzes that play like a text message exchange. You read what comes in, hear it spoken by a native voice, and answer by assembling sentences word by word from the words on offer, with a few tempting wrong ones mixed in among them. A session is short, and you can replay a part whenever you want the phrases to settle.

Two little words that sound almost alike

French keeps tout droit and à droite uncomfortably close, and they send you in completely different directions. The first means straight ahead, the second means to the right, and the only real clue is the small word sitting in front. Learners mix them up constantly, which is why catching them inside a real set of directions beats memorising them from a list.