Archive for the year 2010
Putting Your French Face On: Makeup Vocab Posted by Jennie on Apr 23, 2010
Évidemment (obviously), le maquillage (makeup) n’est pas nécessaire. But it’s fun to play with, and it’s one of the places you’re most likely to see French every day: Check your lip gloss. Does it also say “gloss à lèvres”? I learned a lot of the vocabulaire de maquillage from reading les emballages (the packaging) des…
Provence, terre insolite Posted by Jennie on Apr 22, 2010
Quand j’ai vécu (When I lived) en Provence, j’avais 15 ans. At age fifteen, I was already fascinée par la culture française, and especially by le sud de la France: the fabled South of France. When I decided to go to Provence (on a summer programme d’échange), I thought I would be Brigitte Bardot, passant…
The Zoo of French Idioms Posted by Hichem on Apr 21, 2010
Today, we will enter, in a visite guidée spéciale (a special guided visit), the parc zoologique des locutions (the zoological park of idioms.) Starting with le roi de la jungle (the king of the jungle), we find the expression “la part du lion“, which in this case (a rare one) can be directly deduced by comparing it to its English equivalent…
Travel and volcanoes! Posted by Jennie on Apr 20, 2010
Le volcan Eygalskjfksdfjncadufhaushdfsksjfaskjdfsjdsaa has really changed the game for le transport aérien (aerial transportation). It has directed traffic to other forms of travel, as well as to the pleasures of being cloué à Paris or wherever you are stranded (if you keep your bonne humeur!). For us, it’s a chance to brush up on some…
The (Broken) American Dream of a French Football Team Posted by Hichem on Apr 17, 2010
Today is vendredi. A long week has mercifully come to an end, Dieu merci (Thank God.) What do you les gars (guys) like to do in your fin de semaine (on the weekend) ? Personnellement (personally), one of my favorite passe-temps (hobbies) when I have du temps libre (free time) is to play le football. Let us then… “tackle” a bit the…
American-style coffee, en français Posted by Jennie on Apr 16, 2010
Merci, BfromWR, de votre question: thank you for your question! Le commentateur BfromWR asked a very useful question about the post on ordering coffee from le 5 avril (April 5): “…How would one go about ordering the equivalent of your standard “North American style” coffee with cream and sugar? Commonly referred to as a “double double”…
What is an “Énarque” ? (2ème partie) Posted by Hichem on Apr 14, 2010
We have seen, il y a deux jours (two days ago), a “special species” of people in France called “les énarques.” We found out that they in fact represent the French élite, the crème de la crème of the civil servants, a position in la société française (the French society) which naturally earns them both admiration and outrage. At the beginning, the É.N.A…