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The Vivre en France 🥖 Series — French Dialogues About Daily Life in France
🌿 Level: Intermediate (B1) · 🎧 36 episodes · ▶️ 2 free to try
Not sure it’s your level? 🎧 Take the free 2-minute listening test →
Vivre en France 🥖 is a series of everyday French dialogues about daily life in France — 36 intermediate (B1) episodes, from the supermarket checkout to the broken heating in January. Each one comes with audio, a full French transcript and my colloquial notes. Two episodes are completely free to try; the rest are for members.
🎧 A word from Amélie
Press ▶️ — 30 seconds, in my voice…
« Bienvenue dans Vivre en France ! Visiter la France, c’est bien. Mais y vivre — faire les courses, prendre le train, appeler le plombier quand le chauffage tombe en panne en janvier... — ça, c’est une autre histoire ! Trente-sept scènes de la vraie vie quotidienne, avec le vocabulaire que personne ne pense à t’apprendre. C’est ma série la plus utile, je te le garantis. Un jour tu me remercieras — probablement un jour de panne de chauffage. Allez, on y va ! »
🥖 Living in France — or dreaming of it
Visiting France is one thing. Living it is a completely different sport. Nobody warns you that the real tests of your French aren’t at the Louvre — they’re at the supermarket checkout, on the phone with the train company, and above all the day the heating dies in January and you have to explain that to a plumber who talks like a TGV.
This is my most useful series, and I’ll defend that claim over dinner. Thirty-six scenes of genuinely ordinary life — the laundry, the market, the never-ending paperwork — full of the vocabulary no textbook bothers to teach you, because it’s too busy telling you the monument is beautiful. One day you’ll thank me. Probably on a heating-breakdown day.
Reading small little stories in colloquial French is wonderfully helpful and something too often overlooked in courses. Most of us want to learn so that we can one day converse with native speakers, and for this we need to understand their everyday speech. Merci beaucoup!
— Eulalee
👀 Who it’s for
This is for intermediate learners who don’t just want to visit France — they want to live in it. Whether you’ve moved to France, you’re planning to, or you simply want the French that real life runs on, these are your scenes. If the Paris Series was the holiday, this is the life after it.
Just here for the trip? Start with the Paris Series 🗼 and come back when daily life starts happening to you in French.
Not sure this is your level? Find it in a couple of minutes over on the 🌱 Start Here page, then come straight back.
📚 What you’ll learn
By the end you’ll have the everyday French that textbooks skip — the words French people actually reach for when the day goes sideways. A taste of what’s inside:
on se les pèle — “it’s freezing” (literally we’re peeling ourselves — pure winter-apartment French).
se débrouiller — “to manage, to make do, to sort yourself out” — the single most useful verb for surviving life in France.
ça me fout en rogne — “it makes me furious” — for the day your phone bill has hidden fees.
patauger dans la semoule — “to spin your wheels, to get nowhere fast” (literally to paddle around in the semolina — my all-time favourite).
c’est du gâteau — “it’s a piece of cake” — because some of this really is.
un sac à roulettes — “a wheeled shopping trolley” — the very French answer to lugging the groceries home.
du coup — “so, as a result” — the little filler word spoken French genuinely runs on.
🧭 How to take this course
Every scene stands alone — go in order, or grab whatever life is currently throwing at you.
Steal the scripts. These dialogues are templates: swap the details and they become your phone call to the plumber.
Listen in the podcast feed while you run errands. Doing the shopping while hearing the shopping episode is comically effective. Try it.
🎬 The episode guide
Here’s the full run of everyday French dialogues about daily life in France, in the order I published them — press play on whichever scene matches your week.
36 episodes · 🌿 Intermediate (B1) · 💸 2 free to try
🌱 Start free
Two full episodes are open to try — audio, transcript and notes included:
Subscribe free and a new dialogue lands in your inbox every week — no card, no catch.
✅ Lesson Series Tests
Finished the series? Prove it!
🚀 Ready to start?
Here’s the promise: finally understand real, spoken French — in months, not years. Vivre en France gives you the 20% of French you need to understand 80% of daily life here, the way people actually speak it.
And here’s exactly what’s free. Two full episodes above, plus a new dialogue every week if you subscribe. Members get all 220 lessons, the slow and fast audio, the annotated notes, the exercises with answer keys, the private podcast feed and the monthly level tests.
À très vite dans la première scène !
Ton prof, ton amie,
Amélie x
Last updated: July 2026 — new episodes join this guide as they publish.