There can be many reasons why native speakers don’t understand what seems perfectly good French to you. But if you’re an English speaker talking French, very often it can be a question of vowel pronunciation.
Learning French under the shower
Looking for an opportunity to practice your French? Here’s an idea: talk to yourself.
Bois ton café avant qu’il ne refroidisse !
Grammar’s like geometry. Getting your head round the formulas is the key to raising your French-speaking game.
J’y vais à vélo
Richard Good English has verbs that simply don’t exist in French. And a lot of them involve moving around the place. What’s the French translation of to cycle for example? There isn’t one. You might say: Je vais au boulot à vélo*. If you want to insist on the physical aspect of cycling as an […]
Dear Diary
When you want to learn practical French, it helps if you focus your efforts on words and expressions you’re likely to use on a daily basis. It’s not just that this is the vocabulary that’ll be most useful to you. It’s also that frequent encounters with the same words help make the knowledge stick. A […]
The perfect vocabulary notebook?
Richard Good You must surely recognise this situation. You’re at a party, you’ve been introduced to three people at once and already the names have flown out of your head. It’s both too soon and too late to ask again. What you need is an instant notebook. The brain is supposed to be that. But […]
Parfois, il peut y avoir des cas où…
When learning a language, our first problem is not the learning, it’s where to begin. Should I listen and repeat? Should I study the rules of grammar? Should I be learning verb conjugations off by heart?
Deepl speaks better French than I do
It was a couple of decades ago when the world’s greatest grandmasters had to admit defeat: computers could play chess better than they could. Now for many of us language learners, that moment has arrived too.
Ça, c’est la meilleure de l’année !
Richard Good Good, better, best… never let it rest. Heaping out praise is a satisfyingly easy thing to do in English. In French, it’s disappointingly complicated. There are too many words that are similar yet different, too many twists and turns. But with a bit of clear thinking, we can sort it out. Adjectives versus […]