Richard Good Take a look at these four sentences: (i) It’s me who is in charge. (ii) It’s I who am in charge. (iii) It’s me who am in charge. (iv) It’s I who is in charge. If you’re a native English speaker, you’ll recognize instinctively that (i) and (ii) sound right, whereas (iii) and […]

Take a look at these French sentences and see whether you know what the missing words are. You can click here to see the answers. Hide the answers 1) Je ne me ferai plus prendre à l’avenir. I won’t get caught out again in the future. 2) J’ai confiance dans l’avenir. I have faith in […]

Avec is one of the first words you come across in French.
It means “with”.
It’s easy to pronounce.
Nothing could be simpler. Except…

Richard Good Launching into À la recherche du temps perdu is a unique experience. It’s not so much the length (though at 1.5 million words and 2400 pages it is the longest novel ever published), but the baggage that comes with it. I still remember how small I felt when a fellow student at University […]

The rhythm of spoken French resembles a string of pearls or the beads of a rosary, wrote the phonetician Pierre Delattre: L’égalité syllabique a fait comparer le rythme du français aux perles d’un collier, au grain d’un chapelet, aux battements du coeur. Bien qu’il soit un peu saccadé, ce rythme n’est ni dur (les syllabes […]

It’s sometimes the words that are closest to our own language that are the hardest to adopt.

Joseph Conrad is known as one of the finest ever writers of the English language. He was the author of classic novels such as Under Western Eyes and Heart of Darkness (which was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola into the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now.

You can set up any computer to type with French accents, no matter what keyboard you have. It takes just a couple of minutes using the instructions below. This method works with Chrome browser, you’ll find other solutions below. 1. Download and install Google Chrome 2. Create a Chrome account and sign in with it. […]

Articles don’t always behave the same way in English and French. Because we don’t have the same distinction, getting it right is not something that comes spontaneously. Here’s the explanation.

When we start out learning French, we’re usually taught making nouns and adjectives plural involves adding an -s, or an -x to words that end in -eau or -eu. This is broadly speaking true. But only broadly speaking. Take a look at the following examples: les aides-comptables efficaces les abat-jour orange les tire-bouchons noirs les […]