Promoting French and American friendship and understanding…
When learning a foreign language, there comes a fluency tipping point where you suddenly stop mentally translating words from your native tongue and just use the foreign word instead. For an English speaker, “a fork is a fork”; for a French speaker “une fourchette est une fourchette”. When I am having a conversation in French (or am just in a groovy French-feeling mood), [...]
As a native New Englander, I learned that downhill skiing meant wearing six layers of wool clothing, thick face-cover, triple socks and the occasional mitten warmer to survive the -15F (-26C) wind-chilled New Hampshire slopes. Also don’t forget your well-sharpened skis to grip all of the ice patches that were bound to appear on the 2000 [...]
When most people think of France, they probably imagine the hexagonal country mashed in the middle of continental Europe and its stunning capital city Paris. Although this does make up the most populous bulk of the country, France also consists of many overseas territories (Guadeloupe, Tahiti, etc.) as well as one of the largest, most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean Sea: Corsica (”La [...]
When I was growing up, once I knew how to spell, my parents had the ingenious idea to teach me Pig Latin. For those of you who don’t know what Pig Latin is, it’s a way of creating a sort of “secret language” by transforming English words into seemingly gibberish sounds unless you know the formula for creating the words. In [...]
France is generally regarded as the birthplace of democracy in Europe. Although the 1789 French Revolution is considered by many as the spark that lit the fire of European democratization and the propagation of fundamental concepts such as equality or human rights across the continent, the French Republic itself has had a very turbulent history of trying to maintain its core democratic [...]