Hello everyone. If you're new around here, if this is the first time you've pressed play on this

podcast, let me just introduce myself quickly. My name is Oliver G. I'm Australian. I've been in

Paris since 2015 and this podcast is my job. This is my career. And every week I interview

interesting people from Paris or perhaps I tell stories about my time in

Paris and France, or in episodes like this one, I just share with you some tips, some advice,

things that I've gathered from my time living in Paris as an expat, as a foreigner. So in this

case, you're going to hear me sharing tips on how you can improve your spoken French.

And I think unlike a lot of the other similar lists to this that you might find on the

internet, I'm not trying to sell you anything here. I'm not trying to sell you my courses or

my textbooks or anything. This is explaining how I improved my spoken French, which is mostly by sort of living here and talking to people, real life situations, you know, and a little bit of daring, I'd say. You have to be a little bit daring to do it. So the idea with this list is even if you're brand new and you're only just learning French, there's stuff in there for you. If you're advanced

like I think I am, then there's definitely stuff in here for you too. And if you're in the middle,

you should be fine. But just a little caveat. Before we get into the first one, I want to give you

background on who I am because I think it's important when it comes to language. I'm a native English speaker.

I speak Swedish fluently, which I learned as an adult, which I think really helped me with French.

And when it comes to French, I speak maybe, I don't know, maybe I'd say I'm eight out of ten. How about that?

Eight out of ten? And I stopped studying

it in Paris in the same year that I got here because I didn't like learning in classrooms.

So yeah, there's the background. That's how I deal with languages. I'm not trying to be a

polyglote. You like that? I think I made that word up. It's like a polyglot is someone who speaks a lot of languages.

A polyglot is someone who brags about it.

That's not me.

I'm just using it for background, for information so you know where I'm coming from.

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