I love music and think it is precisely one of the best things about understanding French. When you learn French, you can understand and really appreciate the music. The French-language music industry has some great singers and writers. One of the most internationally renowned French-language singers is Celine Dion. If you have only heard her English songs and really like them, you should listen to a few of her French songs and you’ll be blown away…French (the Canadian variety) is her native language after all. In fact during the concert she gave in Paris which she used to record her live album Au Coeur du Stade (which is I think my very favorite album of hers), she even made reference to the beauty of singing in French (which made the French public go crazy of course) when she said, “…le français c’est la plus belle langue pour chanter l’amour.”
Go to her official website and you can listen to clips of all of her songs and read the lyrics. There, you will notice that one of her French-language albums is called 1 Fille & 4 Types. Types? You may be wondering what that means…I know I once did. Well, they’re her guys. She made that album in close collaboration with 4 outstanding singer-songwriters-musicians who I’m pretty sure are also close friends of hers: Jean-Jacques Goldman, Erick Benzi, Jacques Veneruso and Gildas Arzel.

I remember one of the first slang words I came across the first time I lived in France was ‘mec’ which totally threw me off at first. I came to find out that it was just another word for ‘guy’. Later, I learned that ‘type’ was another word for ‘guy’. The title of this album got me thinking…hmmm…how many different words are there to say ‘man’, ‘guy’, etc….just how many words are there in French that refer to a ‘male person’??? And these are some that I came up with:

un mec, un type, un gars, un homme, un garçon, un bonhomme, un zig, un frangin, un gus, un Julot…

Maybe someone out there could add to this list…it would be great if you could leave a comment with your contribution! Merci en avance!