Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.īecause Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris).įor place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this: Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)Ī good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. It's the repeated rolling throaty 'r' that seems to be the problem, as the below video demonstrates. In fact if you accidentally lock yourself out of your home we hope you've left a key with a neighbour. The French word for locksmith has been the despair of many an Anglophone. Oh, and if a French person invites you to jetez un oeil (throw an eye) it's not an invitation to throw body parts around, they're just asking you to take a glance or run your eye over something. There's even some debate among the French on exactly how to say it.Īnother puzzle is the word for eye, and if you can think of adapting your sentence to talk about two eyes les yeux that is considerably simpler. It's just that you'll never be quite sure whether you live in rouan, wran, roin, roan, rooouen. Not that there's anything wrong with it of course, it's a lovely city with a lot of employment opportunities. If it helps at all, a lot of French people find the English word 'squirrel' quite hard to pronounce, so at least it's even.īut if you're planning on moving to a city, don't make it Rouen. If you're living in a French city you might not have much use for the word for squirrel, but it is something of a tongue twister. Just look out for the rolling r and the 'y' combo again when you're getting by. This is a handy little verb, meaning to manage or to get by, a sensation familiar to most new arrivals in France.Ĭomment est votre français? Je me débrouille – How is your French? I get by. This body part often causes some trouble. Rather than just asking for water, we find it's simpler to order une carafe d'eau or un pichet d'eau if you want tap water or une bouteille d'eau minérale if you want mineral water, just so everyone is clear about what it is that you want. This sounds like it should be a simple 'oh' sound, but it's one that Anglophones frequently don't get quite right when ordering. There's something about the combination of the rolling r and the double l 'y' sounds that Anglophones find very difficult. Two reasons not to call your French neighbours frogs: firstly they may not like it and secondly you'll almost certainly pronounce it wrong. The double l in the feuille makes a 'y' sound in this pastry which literally translates as '1,000 leaves' – a reference to the layers of flaky pastry. This is well worth learning because if you can manage to ask for one in the patisserie you get a delicious flaky pastry and custard confection. The cathedral in the city that is the capital of Normandy. Pouvez-vous m'aider, j'ai un pneu crevé? – Can you help me, my car has a flat tyre? Contrary to English words like pneumonia and pneumatic, in French the p is pronounced in le pneu – a tyre.
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