Breakdown of Pendant la balade, Marie parle de son nouveau blog de cuisine.
Questions & Answers about Pendant la balade, Marie parle de son nouveau blog de cuisine.
Pendant is the most common preposition to express during a period of time. It works well with both concrete and abstract time spans.
- Pendant la balade = during the walk
- You could also hear durant la balade: it’s a bit more formal/literary, but the meaning is almost the same.
- En can indicate the time needed to do something (e.g. en deux heures = in two hours), but you wouldn’t usually say ✗ en la balade here.
So Pendant la balade is the natural, neutral way to say During the walk.
- Balade is a feminine noun, so it takes la: la balade.
- There is also the more common word promenade (also feminine): la promenade.
Nuance:
- une balade: slightly more informal, often feels like a relaxed stroll or outing.
- une promenade: a bit more neutral/formal, “a walk / a stroll”.
You could say:
- Pendant la promenade, Marie parle de…
This would be perfectly correct; it just sounds slightly more neutral or formal than balade.
French usually uses the simple present for both English present simple and present continuous:
- Marie parle can mean:
- Marie speaks / Marie talks (in general)
- Marie is speaking / is talking (right now)
French does have être en train de to insist on “right now”:
- Marie est en train de parler de son nouveau blog = Marie is in the middle of talking about her new blog.
But in most contexts, just Marie parle is enough and naturally corresponds to English Marie is talking in this sentence.
The verb parler uses different prepositions:
- parler de quelque chose = to talk about something
- parler à quelqu’un = to talk to someone / speak to someone
So:
- Marie parle de son nouveau blog = Marie is talking about her new blog.
Parler sur exists, but it’s rare and can mean “to talk badly about / gossip about” someone, or “speak on (top of)” in some technical contexts. It’s not used when you simply say “talk about a topic.”
In French, when you want to say “cooking blog”, you don’t use a structure like X of Y (the way English sometimes does with “blog about cooking”) or X à Y.
Instead, you often use de + noun to specify the domain or subject:
- un blog de cuisine = a cooking blog / a food blog
- un blog de voyage = a travel blog
- un livre de cuisine = a cookbook
So de cuisine here works as a kind of “category” label for the blog: a blog whose subject is cooking.
In French, son / sa / ses agree with the gender and number of the noun possessed, not with the owner.
- blog is masculine singular → you must use son:
- son blog = her blog / his blog
- If the noun were feminine:
- sa voiture = her car / his car (because voiture is feminine)
- Plural:
- ses blogs = her blogs / his blogs
So son nouveau blog means her new blog here, because Marie is the owner, but the form son is chosen only because blog is masculine.
Many French adjectives do indeed come after the noun, but some very common ones typically come before. Classic examples are:
- beau / joli (beautiful / pretty)
- grand / petit (big / small)
- jeune / vieux (young / old)
- bon / mauvais (good / bad)
- nouveau / ancien (new / old/former)
These are often taught with the acronym BAGS (Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size), though it’s not perfect.
So:
- un nouveau blog = a new blog
- un blog intéressant = an interesting blog (here intéressant comes after)
In your sentence, nouveau is one of those adjectives that typically comes before the noun: son nouveau blog.
Un blog de cuisine means a blog whose topic is cooking / a cooking blog.
- The de + noun structure often indicates subject or theme, not physical possession:
- un livre de cuisine = a cookbook (a book about cooking)
- un film de guerre = a war movie (a movie about war)
If you needed to say “the blog of the kitchen” (which is unusual), you’d specify more clearly, e.g.:
- le blog de la cuisine du restaurant = the restaurant kitchen’s blog.
In everyday language, blog de cuisine is clearly understood as a blog about cooking / recipes / food.
You can, but there is a nuance:
- parler de = to talk about (very general, neutral)
- discuter de = to discuss (suggests a more interactive, maybe deeper conversation, sometimes with opinions)
So:
- Marie parle de son nouveau blog = she’s talking about it (explaining, mentioning, telling someone about it).
- Marie discute de son nouveau blog = she’s discussing it with someone (maybe planning, debating, exchanging ideas).
Both are grammatically correct; parler de is the more basic, more frequent choice.
Both word orders are grammatically correct, but the emphasis changes slightly:
Pendant la balade, Marie parle de son nouveau blog de cuisine.
- Emphasis on when it happens: During the walk, Marie talks…
- The time frame is set first.
Marie parle de son nouveau blog de cuisine pendant la balade.
- Emphasis more on what Marie does, and then you add when at the end.
- Feels a bit closer to normal spoken order.
Both are natural; French allows the time expression pendant la balade either at the beginning or the end of the sentence.
In Pendant la balade, Marie parle…, Pendant la balade is an initial adverbial phrase that sets the time frame. In both French and English, it’s very common (and stylistically preferable) to separate such an opening phrase with a comma:
- Pendant la réunion, Paul prend des notes.
- Le matin, je bois un café.
The comma isn’t absolutely mandatory in all cases, but it’s standard and makes the sentence clearer.
Blog is a loanword from English, but it is now fully integrated into French:
- It’s treated as a masculine noun: un blog, le blog, son blog.
- It follows normal French grammar rules:
- plural: des blogs
- adjectives: un blog populaire, un blog français, etc.
There is a more “French” term un blogue used in some regions (especially in Canada), but un blog is very widespread in everyday French in France.