Aéroports And Avions – Taking A Plane in French Posted by John Bauer on Sep 9, 2015
Je viens d’arriver aux USA (I just arrived in the USA) and after le long vol (the long flight) from France, with une escale courte (a short layover) in Spain, all I wanted to do was sleep. I’m back to my home state for the first time in a very long time. Before I got…
Borges, en français! Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Sep 7, 2015
In my “other” life, I teach college classes in literature. And this week I’m teaching about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short story master and the grandfather of magical realism. I have to say that Borges is one of my favorite authors and his stories, such as “The Aleph,” “The Zahir,” “The Garden of Forking…
Which State/Province Are You From? Expressing Location in French Posted by Josh Dougherty on Sep 3, 2015
I’ve been writing about prepositions with certain verbs lately, but today I’d like to discuss prepositions referring to American states and Canadian provinces (still worth reading if you’re not from those places – can never have too much grammar 😉 ) A while back, we wrote a post on how to say you’re from, living…
Keyboard Clash! Typing in French – AZERTY Posted by John Bauer on Sep 2, 2015
After all my hardware problems in the summer heat, I finally had to go out and buy a new computer. Qfter thqt; there zqs q proble, – After that, there was a problem. Le clavier (the keyboard) was in French, and Le clavier français is a bit different from le clavier anglais. Le clavier has…
French Back-to-School: La Rentrée (de réformes) Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Aug 31, 2015
Uh-oh — it’s already la rentrée! As the end of August approaches, students are getting ready to head back to school, people are returning back from vacation, and workers are heading back to work. In French, there’s an important word for all of this: la rentrée. Literally meaning “the return,” la rentrée refers to the…
Can You BRING Me to My French Class? No, but I Can TAKE You… Posted by Josh Dougherty on Aug 27, 2015
Unless you are already on the moon, I’m not going to say this to you! It doesn’t matter how much I want to go there. Logically speaking, ‘bring’ and ‘take’ shouldn’t cause too much confusion, but I hear native speakers make this mistake time and time again (talking about English, by the way). “I’m going to…
Help! Attention! Urgence! Posted by John Bauer on Aug 26, 2015
Many medical and emergency words are similar in French, but they are also different enough to lead to major confusions. Médecin doesn’t mean medicine and an emergency is urgent, but in French it’s l’urgence that takes the name. That last sentence is confusing because of all the closely related words that are nearly the same…