If you ever had the feeling you had mastered the French language, all of these illusions may disappear when you travel to a different area - add regional slang to thick accents and it feels like you never took a French class in your life. Here is a handy list of expressions you may need.
One of the consequences of learning a foreign language is that some words end up integrating themselves into your everyday English, and after a while you end up speaking a weird mixture of French and English. Here are some of the most common French additions.
Households in France, as elsewhere around the world, are feeling the economic squeeze right now as prices rise, but wages don’t. The Local has put together a vocabulary list to help you understand the cost of living crisis:
What you can expect from your energy bills in France in 2023, how serious winter blackout warnings actually are, remote working in France and a word with multiple meanings - here are six essential articles for life in France.
As well as her many other talents, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, who has died at the age of 96, was a fluent French speaker who often exercised her talent during visits to France.
French is the language of love isn't it? Perhaps that's why so many perfectly innocuous French words sound steamy or downright explicit to English ears.
If you've been following this year's French Eurovision entry, you might be struggling to understand the lyrics. And that's because it's not in French, it's sung in the regional language of Breton. Here's what you need to know about it.
It's common when arriving in France to discover the vocabulary you learned at school is totally different to how most French people speak. Well, the same goes for grammar. These are some of the common grammatical structures that French people use for day-to-day chat.
From falling in the apples to acting like a cucumber, the French language has a huge variety of phrases involving fruit and vegetables, here are some of our favourites.
French language guardians the Académie française has issued a new report on institutional communication and taken aim at some of the most commonly-used Anglicisms that it regards as a 'veritable attack' on French.
After 25 years in France, John Lichfield has noticed a new trend and new divide - between those who pepper their conversations with 'hop' and those who prefer 'toc'.
The inclusion of 'iel' in a major French dictionary has caused an outcry from France's Education Minister and other critics, who say it opens the door to wokeness.
Someone just jumped out at you wearing a ghost costume? Seen something truly weird online? Here are 11 of the best ways to express your shock or amazement in colloquial French.
The French curse word of choice is frequently an English one. The Local tries to get to the bottom of why the French are so fond of f**k - often in situations that would make an Anglophone blush. (Contains a lot of strong language).
French students are increasingly heading online to learn English from social media, games and online chat - with some surprising results for their vocabulary.
Many people will have been taught in school that in France you refer to younger or unmarried women as mademoiselle and older or married women as madame. But that does that teaching still hold true today?
