Friday’s French – terrible & formidable Rosemary Kneipp, May 16, 2014March 27, 2017 “I love your blog. It’s terrible”. This comment was left on my daughter’s blog. I’d hate to think what the comment would be if she didn’t like the blog! The reader making the comment is French of course and not aware that terrible is something negative in English. Like formidable…. Continue Reading
Friday’s French – Venetian blinds & persiennes Rosemary Kneipp, May 9, 2014March 2, 2023 When you grow up in Australia, you know all about Venetian blinds. They are not nearly as popular in France and most people don’t know how to use them. We had them at the French university where I taught and I began each year with a lesson on how to… Continue Reading
Architecture Friday’s French – fenêtre, vitre, baie & vitrail Rosemary Kneipp, April 25, 2014January 26, 2021 You’d seriously think that something as simple as a window would have a direct correspondence in French, now wouldn’t you ? Well, it doesn’t . The English word “window” has a much wider connotation than the French fenêtre. The comparison starts off simply enough. J’ai regardé par la fenêtre = I… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – travail Rosemary Kneipp, April 18, 2014April 20, 2014 I wrote a short post last week about travaux so I thought I should talk about travail today. You may remember that travail comes from the low Latin trepalium, instrument of torture, derived from the Latin tres, three, and palus, stake. I was about to give travaux scientifiques and travaux manuels as examples of… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – travaux Rosemary Kneipp, April 11, 2014April 18, 2014 This is going to be a very short post because we are up to our necks in travaux. Travaux, the plural of travail is, interestingly enough, from the low Latin trepalium, instrument of torture, derived from the Latin tres, three, and palus, stake. Well, I can tell you, the pain… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – gate, clôture, barrière , portail Rosemary Kneipp, April 3, 2014April 29, 2016 I am a firm believer in learning vocabulary if you want to speak another language with any fluency. However, it has the disadvantage of giving the impression that A always equals B. Which is not true of course. I still remember learning that gate = barrière = and fence =… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – arbre, arbuste, arbrisseau, buisson Rosemary Kneipp, March 20, 2014October 10, 2015 I originally thought the equation was arbre = tree, arbuste = shrub and buisson = bush. Well, I was wrong. The first time I saw a lilac bush, I thought it was a tree. It looked like a tree to me and certainly not like a bush (a lot of… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – relâche Rosemary Kneipp, March 15, 2014 It’s actually Saturday, but we’ve had two days away cycling around Saumur and are now gardening like mad so this is going to be a very quick post. Relâche is what you say when there is no performance. If a cinema is closed on Mondays, for example, you’d say, le lundi… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – se rappeler, se souvenir, mémoire, souvenir Rosemary Kneipp, March 7, 2014December 9, 2025 Se rappeler and se souvenir are almost complete synonyms. I can’t really think of any occasion on which one can’t replace the other. However, there is a grammatical difference which fewer and fewer people observe these days. Se rappeler takes a direct object and se souvenir doesn’t. So what does… Continue Reading
Friday’s French – mondain, mundane & banal Rosemary Kneipp, February 27, 2014June 20, 2017 “She’s very mundane”, a bilingual French-English speaker said to me recently, obviously thinking that mundane means the same thing as mondain. To start off with, in English, we wouldn’t use mundane to describe a person, but rather something more abstract such as life or existence. Mundane means dull and ordinary… Continue Reading