Here is an episode in which I walk through the streets of Paris, rambling about a particular subject. This time the subject is Paris itself. This summer Paris is hosting the Olympic Games. The city will be filled with visitors. I am very curious to see how the city will handle this moment. Will it be a huge success? What will visitors think of the city? Will anyone suffer from the mysterious “Paris Syndrome”? Join me on my walk, follow my words, look out for vocab and consider using my questions for your own speaking practice.

[DOWNLOAD AUDIO]

Discussion Questions

Feel free to use these questions for your own speaking practice.

1. Have you ever been to Paris? When did you come here? What did you do and see? What did you think of the place?
2. If you have never been to Paris, would you like to? Why?
3. What associations do you have with Paris? What do you imagine, when you think of this city?
4. Have you ever seen any films or TV series set in Paris? What image of the city do they present?
5. Have you ever been to London? Did it match your expectations?
6. Think of a city that you know well. Try to talk about it.
   What is it famous for?
   What can you see and do there?
   Does your city have a reputation?
   Does the reality match the reputation?
7. Has your city ever hosted the Olympic Games? What did residents think about it before, during and after the games took place?

Vocabulary

There will be a premium episode dealing with vocabulary, coming soon. https://www.teacherluke.co.uk/premiuminfo

Ending ramble

OK, this is not actually the end of the episode, as you can probably see from the running time. There’s a lot more left in this episode.

I am now back in my podcastle, where I am much more comfortable recording and being on video.

Having reviewed the footage which you have just heard and seen I wanted to just reflect on it and give my thoughts on this experimental episode and how I might do more of these Walk & Talk episodes, and whether I will do more of them at all.

So here are my thoughts on this.

• The footage looks fantastic. Good colours. Very clear. Smooth image stabilisation.
• I didn’t show many landmarks in the video but I wanted to keep it natural and just show the places where I would typically go on my way home or on a trip into town to get lunch. You did see the Eiffel Tower (very briefly at the start), Les Invalides, Grand Palais, Assemble Nationale, Concorde, Louvre, La Seine, Les Tuileries, Place Vendome – so actually quite a lot of landmarks I suppose!
• I’m slightly concerned that referring to all these visual things will make this less satisfying to listen to as an audio only episode, but I really hope not. It should be an immersive audio experience too.
• The audio sounds good enough I think. It’s not as loud and rich as normal but that’s to be expected. It’s hard to get the mic in the right position and there’s lots of background noise, but it’s good enough.
• I’m not overly happy about the way I look! You can see up my nose and there are not very flattering angles, but I should not be vain about this and you probably don’t care about it as much as me.
• I was so self conscious about walking along with the cam in my face it makes me seriously doubt if I can do that regularly. It wasn’t as pleasant as I’d hoped. I felt very self-conscious and awkward and that prevented me from getting into my normal flow of speaking.
• Putting the cam on my shirt is great – I can be completely hands free and continue to record, but the battery runs out quite fast. Also, you can’t see my face, which is reasonably important.
• My original plan was to have a load of questions that I answer on a topic then see what topic vocab comes up in those questions and answers. You heard me mention that I’d used ChatGPT to help me write the questions quickly. In this episode about Paris I didn’t really answer many questions from my list. But you can still find some questions about cities on the episode page. Use them to practise talking about a city you know well.
• I’ll have to review all those ChatGPT questions on other topics because the ones it came up with about Paris were actually very dry and not that fruitful. I didn’t fully answer the questions it gave me about Paris, but it’s ok. I think I still discussed the city enough.
• It was a bit difficult to prioritise the speaking and expressing myself because I was multi tasking. Operating the camera, moving around and feeling self conscious. When I’m in the pod room I can focus more on what I’m saying.
• I’ll try this again, and next time will focus on a specific topic with questions and vocab as I promised. Maybe I can sum up the vocab in a premium ep each time.
• What do you think?
  I’m particularly interested in hearing from audio LEPsters.
  Audio listeners – how was it? Loud enough? Clear enough? Was there a lot of atmospheric noise? Did that make it hard to hear, or did it add to the atmosphere of the episode?

Song: “The Look You Give That Guy” by Eels