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Prehistoric France Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on May 3, 2015
Have you ever seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)? If not, rent it now. It’s an incredibly powerful movie that allows those of us who are not archeologists to commune with the past in a meaningful way. While not about French culture per se, Herzog’s documentary focuses on the Chauvet caves in southern France, the…
10 Nouveaux Mots Pour 2015 Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Apr 27, 2015
Every year, the editors of the French dictionnaires Le Petit Robert and Le Petit Larousse announce the new words that will be added to the next year’s edition. There are normally two rules the linguists employed by these dictionaries use in order to determine whether a new word should be incorporated: 1. the frequency of the…
5 Faux Amis to Watch Out For Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Apr 20, 2015
Les faux amis, or false friends, are words or phrases that look the same or very similar in one language, but differ greatly in meaning. These are also known, more technically, as false cognates. Les faux amis can be tricky for many levels of French learners and are made even trickier by the fact that…
5 French Onomatopoeias Commonly Used in Conversation Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Apr 13, 2015
Last year, MTaulier wrote a great post on some French onomatopées. Make sure to check it out to learn about the different kinds of onomatopoeias in French. Today, I want to focus on something a little different: a certain kind of French onomatopoeia that is commonly used in conversation. Because French is very expressive, many of these…
Top 5 Francophone Albums Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Apr 6, 2015
Listening to music is a great way to learn another language. Why? It is easier to memorize melodies and lyrics together than to just memorize sentences. Something in my brain is triggered when I hear music and, although I wouldn’t say that I have a great memory, I remember every note and lyric of the songs…
Top 10 “Untranslatable” French Words Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 31, 2015
I hesitate to use the word “untranslatable” here because, frankly, there is no perfect translation between languages. Words and concepts have different shades of meanings in different languages based on particular linguistic cultures and histories. But non-native speakers can have an idea of a particular word, even if they don’t know all shades of its…
L’accent tonique (French Phonetics III) Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 23, 2015
Hello everyone! Today, as promised, we will be going over l’accent tonique, or the tonic accent, which has to do with stressing a particular word in a sentence for emphasis. As you’ve read in the previous posts in this series on French phonetics, in French you don’t stress individual words to emphasize them. Rather, word…