Tag Archives: free French lesson
French Grammar – Past imperfect Posted by Tim Hildreth on Apr 3, 2018
Welcome to lesson 3 in our mini French Grammar series. After le passé récent and le futur proche, it’s time this week to look at the French tense known as l’imparfait. L’Imparfait (The imperfect) Like le passé composé, le passé simple, and the passé récent, l’imparfait is a tense for talking about things that…
French Grammar – Back to the future Posted by Tim Hildreth on Mar 27, 2018
Last week I kicked off a short series of posts on useful French grammar topics that sometimes get ignored. This week we head back to the future* with a look at a way to talk about upcoming actions and events that is as easy as the passé récent that we looked at last week. Le…
French Grammar – The Recent Past Posted by Tim Hildreth on Mar 20, 2018
This week I’m starting a mini-series to address some useful ways for talking about actions and events in time that don’t always gets as much attention as other tenses. First up, an easy way to talk about things that happened in the past without resorting to the passé composé or the more literary passé simple…
French Pronunciation and…Squirrels? Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 19, 2018
We all know that French pronunciation can be difficult (but not impossible!) for English speakers to master. The French “r” is particularly difficult, for example. But, according to legend, there is one word that the French themselves used during World War II to discover non-French spies…écureuil, which means “squirrel.” The word écureuil (nm) rhymes with the…
French Nursery Rhymes: Au Clair de la lune Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 16, 2018
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a nursery rhyme with an interesting origin. That comptine, as nursery rhymes are known in French, might not have been as familiar to English speakers as the one I’m writing about today. The melody of “Au Clair de la lune” is probably familiar to most people around the world…
French Nursery Rhymes: Une Souris Verte Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Feb 26, 2018
One of my son’s favorite French children’s songs is “Une Souris verte.” It’s a very strange—albeit catchy—tune that dates back to the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. The song’s lyrics, or paroles, are below: Une souris verte qui courait dans l’herbe Je l’attrape par la queue Je la montre à ces messieurs Ces messieurs me disent…
French Biathlon at the 2018 Winter Olympics Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Feb 19, 2018
Have you been watching the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang? (Tim offered some really useful French vocabulary for the Olympics last week.) If you have, and you’re based in the United States, you’ve probably been following several sports in particular, including figure skating, ice hockey, and skiing/snowboarding. There’s another sport that you may not be as…