I have this habit of taking online French placement tests, just for fun. (Most language schools’ websites have free tests you can take.) The majority of these tests focus on verb conjugations and agreement between nouns and adjectives. In other words, grammar. This is why I always get near perfect scores on these tests even [...]

Dix choses que vous ne saviez pas au sujet de moi… 1. I’ve been working on typing comparative vocabulary lists of the Romance and Germanic languages for, oh, about FIVE years now. And I’m still not done. It’s just so mind-numbingly boring to sit here and type word after word in Excel. But the finished [...]

More and more, I’m starting to believe that there is a secret society that banishes authors from teaching real French in any books. French has such an astounding number of slang words and expressions, as well as a spoken form that is sometimes nearly unrecognizable from the written form, that I truly believe this entire [...]

A French joke. Two cats were swimming across the English Channel – an English cat named One two three, and a French cat named Un deux trois. Which cat made it across the Channel first? The One two three cat won, because the un deux trois cat sank. Get it? Un deux trois quatre cinq… [...]

It’s strange the words you forget in your own language when living abroad. Usually my memory lapses only last for a minute, but there was one word that I could not remember for the past five months. I knew it didn’t really exist in France so I never bothered to search for it in the [...]

I frequently borrow childrens’ books from the local médiathèque, conveniently located two blocks from our apartment. David and I decided to borrow a book called Etats-Unis yesterday to see if it was accurate in its description of my country. We were reading through it together last night when we came across this sentence describing Thanksgiving: [...]