I love Hot Potatoes. I’ve been making some interactive matching, multiple choice, and gap-fill exercises to go with my Informal French & Slang page. Do you know what une tube is? How about potin? Pige? Toubib? Flotte? Check out the exercises here!
Full Story »Books for 2 €
For those who like to read, but are dirt poor like me, Librio publishes books for 1-3 € each. You can find several famous French works, as well as English works translated into French. (But check Project Gutenberg first if you want to download non-copyright protected works for free.) Their collections include literature, poetry, theatre, [...]
Full Story »Nobody studies French Literature in High School
I recently found out that College Board is going to cancel the AP exam in French Literature as of 2009. Also gone are Latin Literature and Italian Language & Culture. German Literature has been gone for 10 years, so that leaves us with Chinese Language & Culture, French Language, German Language, Japanese Language & Culture, [...]
Full Story »Translations
Here are the translations from the real French post. I can honestly say I never learned these expressions from my high school or university books/classes. I only learned them when I moved to France. Elle tire le diable par la queue. = She barely gets by (financially). C’est pas vraiment le Pérou. = It’s nothing [...]
Full Story »Real French.
If you only learned textbook French in school, could you understand these sentences? All of them are from one page of a thread that I found on a random forum. This is why idioms and slang are an essential part of any language course! Elle tire le diable par la queue. C’est pas vraiment le [...]
Full Story »Learning languages for free with the internet.
Tip of the day: Use the internet to take advantage of the public domain. Foreign Service Institute Language Courses: Designed and written by the US government but with no copyright protection. You can download the texts (PDF format) and audio files (mp3s) for free. Not all languages are available for download as the site depends [...]
Full Story »Things I learned today
Le premier mai is la fête du travail (labor day) and the only day in France when anyone can sell flowers legally – not just florists. You will see tons of people and places (if they’re open…) selling muguets (lily of the valley) because it’s supposed to bring good luck to whomever you give them [...]
Full Story »About About.com
There are very few language sites that offer useful, free information to help you actually learn the real language (slang, idioms, informal speech, etc.) About.com’s language sites do include a lot of useful information, but the problem is finding what you want among the bazillion pages and sponsored links that look exactly like the content. [...]
Full Story »Y en. (Not a French donkey.)
I hate y and en. These little words have caused so much confusion for me in French. The basic rules are: 1) y replaces a prepositional phrase (except those beginning with de). It translates as “there” or “it” and sometimes it is not translated into English. On va à Boston demain. We’re going to Boston [...]
Full Story »La langue française me rend folle.
Sometimes there are certain aspects of the French language that drive me crazy. Verbs of movement is one example. French does not use adverbs of motion the same way that English does, so it is not possible to translate literally “He ran across the street” into French. Sure, you can say il a couru for [...]
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