Just the other day I heard a person being interviewed on television say something like : “As Peggy Lee used to sing – and here I’m dating myself – … “. (A common variant is “: …and I know I’m dating myself … Continue reading
If you’ve ever heard Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, speak French and English, you know he speaks them extremely well. He comes across as articulate and eloquent yet personable in both languages. This is what I call high-performing bilingualism, … Continue reading
In a previous blog post, I looked at a potential source of confusion when learning how to use grammatical gender in French. We looked at the complexities surrounding masculine nouns that start with a vowel or a silent h. In … Continue reading
(Subscribe on the right of the screen and be notified by e-mail of new posts.) Mastering grammatical gender is probably the most difficult aspect of French for speakers of English. I’m referring of course to that complicated business of so-called … Continue reading
In a previous post, I detailed a friendly argument I had with a Paris-based French teacher over the current use of the French pronoun ON to replace ILS or ELLES in modern spoken French. The argument ended with the remark … Continue reading
I recently had an interesting e-mail exchange with a Paris-based French teacher who wrote me to complain about the bad influence one of my blog posts was having on her American students. It seems that my September 2012 post on … Continue reading