How to describe routes and distances in French

To describe routes and distances in French, here are some commonly used expressions and structures:

• To give directions or describe a route, use verbs like aller (to go), continuer (to continue), tourner (to turn), and prepositions indicating direction or location such as à droite (to the right), à gauche (to the left), tout droit (straight ahead).
• To indicate distance, use units like mètre(s) (meter(s)), kilomètre(s) (kilometer(s)), and words such as près de (near), loin de (far from), or expressions like à environ (about/approximately).
• Common phrases to describe routes include: Prenez la première rue à droite (Take the first street on the right), Continuez tout droit (Continue straight ahead), La gare est à deux kilomètres (The station is two kilometers away).
• Describing landmarks and relative positions often involves phrases such as en face de (facing), à côté de (next to), derrière (behind), and au coin de (at the corner of).

These expressions help construct clear and natural descriptions of routes and distances in French. If you want, examples of sentences or more specific vocabulary for urban versus rural navigation can also be provided.

References

• Linguistic typology of motion events in visual narratives

• From Paths to Routes: A Method for Path Classification

• R Package gdistance: Distances and Routes on Geographical Grids

• TrajRoute: Rethinking Routing with a Simple Trajectory-Based Approach — Forget the Maps and Traffic!

• Euclide, the crow, the wolf and the pedestrian: distance metrics for linguistic typology

• Metric and Path-Connectedness Properties of the Frechet Distance for Paths and Graphs

• The Road Network in the Longue Durée: A Reading Key of the History of Territories

• Route planning on orienteering maps with least-cost path analysis