Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul

Overview

The French you learned in school won't get you far! Pardon My French is an entertaining and useful guide to the words and phrases every Francophile, traveler, student, and word maven should know, with fascinating lore and tidbits that make sense of the Gallic mind-set.

Englishman Charles Timoney was thrown into French life headfirst twenty-five years ago when he and his wife moved to native France. He had studied French in school, but his memory of vocabulary lists and verb-conjugation drills proved no match for day-to-day living and communicating with French coworkers. As he blundered towards fluency, he collected the idioms and phrases that no one ever taught him in a classroom and that wonderfully (sometimes wickedly) epitomized l'esprit francais. Pardon My French includes insider's language tips for dining, shopping, understanding French slang, and more. Selections include:

� Faire un canard, which literally means "to do a duck,"but also refers to dunking sugar lumps in coffee and is the preferred way to get a kick of sugar caffeine in France.
� Tablette de chocloat, which literally means "chocolate bar," but is also the term for a finely muscled male stomach in France. Since the English equivalent is a "six pack," it's a splendid example of how differently we see things!

Packed throughout with whimsical cartoons and trivia (including the words to "La Marseillaise"), Pardon My French is a marvelous armchair trip abroad.

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Author Information

Bio of Charles Timoney

When Charles Timoney and his French wife were both made redundant in the same week they decided to try living in France for a year or so. It proved much harder than expected. Charles' O level in French was little help when everyone around him consistently used a wide variety of impenetrable slang and persisted in the annoying habit of talking about things he had never heard of. But they stayed. Two decades and two thoroughly French children later, he decided to write the guide to French that would have saved him from so many blunders and misunderstandings along the way. Pardon My French: Unleash Your Inner Gaul is it.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin

Filesize

1.33 MB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9781436215350