All posts · Lire en français

French listening practice with the news: dictation and shadowing

By Nikita Kostin · November 7, 2026 · 5 min read

Reading the news builds vocabulary and grammar fast. Listening is a different skill. You can know every word in a sentence and still not catch it when it's spoken, because French runs words together, drops letters and links sounds across word boundaries. Two old techniques close that gap better than passive listening: dictation and shadowing. Both work well with news texts, because you can check yourself against the written article.

Why news texts work for listening practice

• You can check every word. Podcasts and videos rarely have exact transcripts. A news article is its own transcript.
• You can choose the level. Start with a short A1 or A2 text, then work up to the original.
• The vocabulary is the exam's. The listening papers of TEF and TCF Canada use the same register as the news: public life, work, health, the environment.

Every article on Easy French News has a listen button that reads the text aloud with your device's French voice. A synthetic voice isn't a substitute for real speakers, but it's clear and patient, which is exactly what you need for these two exercises.

Dictation: ten minutes that show you what you can't hear

Dictation sounds like a school exercise. It's also one of the most honest diagnostics there is, because it shows exactly which sounds you miss.

How to do it

1. Pick a short text below your reading level. If you read at B1, take an A2 article. You're training your ear, not your vocabulary.
2. Listen to one sentence without looking at the text.
3. Write it down. Play it again up to three times if you need to.
4. Compare with the text and mark every difference.
5. Sort the mistakes: a missing word, a wrong word, or a spelling or accent slip.

Ten sentences is enough for one session.

What your mistakes tell you

• Missing small words (de, le, en, y): you're hearing the content words but not the grammar between them. That's normal at first and improves with repetition.
• Word boundaries in the wrong place (les enfants heard as les zenfants): liaison. Learn the main liaison rules and listen for them.
• Endings missing (ils parlent versus il parle): in speech, these often sound identical. Context decides, and dictation teaches you to use it.
• Accents and spelling: count these separately. They're spelling, not listening. Many keyboards make é awkward to type, so don't let accents hide your real listening score.

The Dictation mode in our drills (a Plus feature) does the comparison for you. It aligns your sentence with the original so one missed word doesn't make the rest look wrong, and it marks accent slips separately from real mistakes.

Shadowing: training your mouth to train your ear

Shadowing means speaking along with a recording, a fraction of a second behind it, like a shadow. It improves pronunciation and rhythm, and also listening, because once your mouth can produce French at natural speed, your ear can follow it.

How to do it

1. Read the text first and make sure you understand it. Shadowing a text you don't understand is just noise.
2. Listen once while reading along.
3. Shadow with the text: play the audio and speak along with it, reading the words.
4. Shadow without the text: same again, eyes closed. You'll stumble. That's the point.
5. Repeat the hardest paragraph three times.

Ten minutes a day is plenty. Pay attention to rhythm more than to perfect sounds: French gives each syllable about the same weight and stresses the end of a group of words. Getting that rhythm right does more for being understood than any single vowel.

A weekly listening routine

Wednesday's exercise is the one closest to the exam: the recording plays and the text stays hidden. In timed practice on this site (a Plus feature), that's the Listening mode. The text is read aloud once, the questions follow, and the transcript appears only at the end.

A note on real voices

Synthetic voices are clear and steady. Real speakers are faster, interrupt themselves and have accents. Use the listen button for the controlled exercises above, and real broadcasts for the weekend session. You need both: control to learn the sounds, variety to cope with the exam.

For the reading side of exam preparation, see NCLC 7 in French reading.