Everyday French – ep 3 : l'Automne 🍁​

Hello everyone, welcome to episode three of Everyday French, a podcast to help you listen to real, natural French, at a completely normal speed. Just a reminder that there's a transcript in the description to help you if I'm talking too fast or if there's vocabulary you don't understand.

This week I decided to talk to you about autumn, so that's the topic we're going to talk about today.

Let's go!

So you know, in France autumn officially starts on September 21st, so it's already been a while since autumn started, but in reality we really start feeling the first changes around mid-October in general. In France, it stays fairly nice through September — actually we often call it Indian summer, because it's not too hot, the weather stays fairly nice and pleasant. And this year autumn arrived pretty late, it arrived just about now. Up until recently, it was still nice, still sunny, at least in my region. And it was really, really pleasant to enjoy the outdoors — except, except for the mosquitoes, because unfortunately we've had tiger mosquitoes arriving for a few years now. And normally they disappear in October when temperatures drop. And this year we still have them in November — like, we're on November 12th and there are still some ready to bite us at any moment.

For me, autumn is a period I feel pretty mixed about. I'm not really sure if I like autumn or not — it's the period right after summer. So generally we're happy because temperatures start dropping. But at the same time, it's when the clocks change, and you know in France in summer the sun generally sets very late. And in autumn, the sun starts setting earlier. Like, we went from the sun setting at 7pm to it setting at 5:40pm now, and for us that's really early. So it's not really a period I enjoy, because I feel like I have less time — I can't go running in the evening anymore. It gets dark early, and on top of that the chill arrives too, the leaves fall, it rains more than before, and the wind too — in my region the wind picks up.

So it's not really a very pleasant time, but at the same time it's also the period that signals winter is coming. And winter in France is so great — we've got skiing, we've got snow in the mountains. We've got fondue, raclette, and also all our end-of-year holidays with Christmas and New Year's. And that's really, really nice.

So there you go, autumn has arrived, it's finally getting cold at my place, it's starting to rain, the sky is grey. And night falls early. So I'm a little more down than before, but I'm really happy because winter is coming.

So how's autumn where you live? Does it get you down? Or on the contrary, are you thrilled because the summer heat is over? Or maybe you live in a tropical country and it's nice all year round and really hot? Feel free to tell me about it in the comments.

See you soon.