Learning French: where do you live?

Whether you’re moving abroad to settle in France, heading to a francophone country on holiday, or just having a chat with a French speaker, a common topic of conversation might include someone asking, “so, where do you live?”

In this month’s blog, we’re covering the verbs, phrases and nouns you’ll need to ask someone about their hometown or living situation, as well as telling them about your own. Once you’ve picked up the basics, you should start to feel more at home with this topic!

To start things off, let’s look at the most basic questions which might spark up this conversation:

While things might begin with a fairly simple question, there are lots of options for how you might respond, and where the conversation might take you next.

As an aside, you might want to take a refresher by reading our French conversation blog on asking questions. But if you’re feeling quite confident with questions in French, feel free to continue!

One of the key verbs here is habiter, meaning ‘to live’. Let’s pause to take a closer look at some useful structures involving this verb:

You might have noticed while exploring this verb, that several elements might come while discussing this topic:

• Which country you live in
• Which town or city you live in
• What type of building you live in
• Who you live with

While the first couple of examples are self-explanatory as per the structures, you might need extra nouns to help you fill in the blanks for different types of living situations.

If you end up making a French pen pal on your travels, you might want to share addresses to write to each other the old-fashioned way! However, it’s probably more useful these days to be able to tell someone your address aloud for phone conversations, like registering with a service or checking on a delivery.

Either way, you might need to know how to say your own address in French. Similarly, when they tell you theirs, you might need a bit of conversation knowledge in order to understand the equivalent structures in English:

Of course, in French, there are a couple of quirks to note. First of all, for houses split into more than one flat or homes on the same property, use the word bis instead of A or B like addresses in the UK:

Normally, a UK postcode has a city code, then neighbourhood, then the specifics for your street address. A postcode for France contains five numerical digits only. The first two digits are the département and the last three are the more specific town or city. So if you need to say a French postcode aloud, make sure to split it into these two sets of numbers.

For example, the postcode for the town of Vernet-les-Bains in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France would be said aloud like so:

For this type of situation, you might also find it useful to read our conversation blog about talking on the phone in French.

Language In Use

Here is a summary of the most useful words, phrases and structures covered in this blog.