Les vêtements, savoir et connaître, les possessifs

Here is everything we studied in connection with Chapter 13 of French Made Simple.



1. Shopping for clothes

Our study of numbers took us on a detour down the clothing aisle of our favorite department store. We started with the following exercise from Podcast Français Facile:

• Listen to the price (numbers from 1 to 400): this text describes a customer's shopping trip to a boutique. Listen to the audio file from the link above and fill in the prices in the class handout. I adapted my handout from this original pdf, which includes the answers. 

• Buying Clothes (created by tkdana at ISLCollective): we took the shopping theme a little further with these two short dialogues between a customer and a clothing store attendant. In class, we used these as templates to improvise little dialogues. [BEGINNER]

• Clothing vocabulary: this is a useful vocabulary list, also created by Podcast Français Facile. You can hear an audio version of the list on the original page. [BEGINNER]

• Exercise - Clothing (adapted from a document by Nattik at ISLCollective): here's a fun exercise to practice the clothing vocabulary, where you need to match each picture to its name. I mostly kept the original document but I changed a couple of pictures that seemed ambiguous to me. [BEGINNER]

• Finally, here are a few more online resources around clothing and buying things you might be interested in:

Basic vocabulary you'll need to go shopping in France [BEGINNER]

Clothing: picture vocabulary and quiz [BEGINNER]

Buying / Asking for: easy dialogues with audio [BEGINNER]

Listening comprehension game: listen to each audio file and associate it with a store.

2. The verbs savoir and connaître

Since both verbs can be translated in English by "to know", figuring out which one to use can be a little tricky.

• Here is the class handout on the topic, based on an exercise by jannabanna at ISLCollective.

• Here's another series of exercises on savoir/connaître from a Quebec university. We only did the first page in class. Don't hesitate to do the rest of the exercises, as the pdf also includes an answer sheet. 

• Dialogue: Anniversaire (from Podcast Français Facile). This easy dialogue gave us the opportunity to study the verbs savoir and connaître in context. The page includes the audio file as well as the transcript and questions we studied in class.

• You can also have a look at PFF's lesson about the difference between savoir and connaître, and test your knowledge with the quiz at the bottom of the page.

3. Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns

The other grammar point in Chapter 13 is a review of the possessive adjectives. In class, we also studied the possessive pronouns, and how to go from the adjective to the pronoun. Here are the handouts, including the exercises we did in class:

• The Possessive Adjectives, created by francereference at ISLCollective

• The Possessive Pronouns, created by francereference at ISLCollective

• The Possessive Game: this is a playful activity around possessive adjectives. The class handout above explains how to play the game. To create the image cards, I used tkdana's document at ISLCollective (plus a few more images).

• The Possessive Adjectives at Le Baobab Bleu. If you want to study the topic some more, this is a great resource that includes an exercise sheet (with the answers at the end), a short video (in French, but not too hard to understand -- see also below), and many links to online exercises.