French with Flo

Using properly the casual address "tu" or the formal address "vous" is very important when you speak French. Use "vous" at the wrong time and you'll sound strange and overly formal ; use "tu" wrongly and you might very well offend the person you're talking to... which is what happened to Boris, a young French learner, in the video above. Poor Boris, he learned the hard way! This text comes from the book "Je vis en France : vingt lectures faciles pour découvrir la civilisation française" by Marie Barthe and Bernadette Chovelon. Here is the class handout (slightly reformatted from the original.) There are many, many resources on the Internet about this topic. Here is one I like:

To my knowledge, our classroom textbook " French Made Simple " doesn't come with an audio version, which makes things difficult for beginners who try to study on their own. To help them, I intend to record the French examples, texts and (possibly) exercises as we progress in our study of the book. Tall order! Wish me luck... And now, let's start at the beginning. French Made Simple - Chapter 1 This is a general presentation of the French language, including many words that are very similar between French and English. Page 1: Words with same spelling, same meaning, different pronunciation 🔊 FMS 01-01.mp3 Page 1-2: Words with same meaning but slightly different spelling 🔊 FMS 01-02.mp3 Page 2: Words directly borrowed from French, with similar pronunciation 🔊 FMS 01-03.mp3 French Made Simple - Chapter 2, Part 1 : Pronunciation Pages 4-6 - Introductory section: some basic French vowel sounds 🔊 FMS 02-01.mp3 Pages 6-7: French Vowe...

As we've seen, feasting takes a prominent place in Christmas and end-of-year celebrations in France. So, after all these excesses, in early January, what do French people do? They eat cake! 😂 The "fête des Rois", or Épiphanie, is a popular holiday for French people, no matter their religion (or absence thereof.) The video shown in class, from FrenchPod101.com, gives a very good overview of the subject. Our first handout this week was a crossword puzzle with accompanying vocabulary (adapted from this webpage .) We also worked on a fill-in-the-blanks exercise . You can find here the audio document the exercise above is based on. Scroll up and click on the first video to hear the text. Just under the video is a multiple-choice exercise you may find entertaining, and a little below is the full transcript of the text. And, by the way, how do you make this famous galette des Rois? Well, apparently, it's child's play. Enjoy! 😋