Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain, in a book as fizzy as a bottle of the finest French champagne, the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate, they converse. To understand and speak French well, one must understand that French conversation runs on a set of rules that go to the heart of French culture. Why do the French like talking about "the decline of France"? Why does broaching a subject like money end all discussion? Why do the French become so aroused debating the merits and qualities of their own language? Through encounters with school principals, city hall civil servants, gas company employees, old friends and business acquaintances, Julie and Jean-Benoît explain why, culturally and historically, conversation with the French is not about communicating or being nice. It's about being interesting. After reading The Bonjour Effect, even readers with a modicum of French language ability will be able to hold their own the next time they step into a bistro on the Left Bank.

    You are quickly introduced to grammatical rules and concepts in order of importance, which you can build on as you progress through the book. You will also learn more than 300 verbs, chosen by their frequency of use. Numerous exercises and engaging readings help you quickly build your speaking and comprehension prowess.

    It offers rich vocabulary coverage, with full treatment of World English, rare, historical, and archaic terms, as well as scientific and technical vocabulary, and provides hundreds of helpful notes on grammar and usage. The CD-ROM version of the dictionary offers full-text search functionality, instant look-up from WindowsR documents, including email and the Internet, high-quality spoken pronunciations for thousands of words, and interactive educational word games, making it ideal for family use, as well as for homework and school use. New to this edition is a fascinating Word Histories feature, telling the often bizarre stories of the origins and development of hundreds of words. For example, did you know that the word grammar is related to glamour, or that cockney used to mean a spoilt child? This dictionary also contains full appendices on topics such as alphabets, currencies, electronic English, and the registers of language, from formal to slang, plus a useful Guide to Good English with advice on grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

    The most important and most commonly used French verbs are presented alphabetically in chart form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all persons and tenses, both active and passive. This thorough guide to the use of verbs features many additional references and tips, including a bilingual list of more than 1,250 additional French verbs, helpful expressions and idioms for travelers, and verb drills and tests with questions answered and explained. French language students will also find an index of English-French verbs, a section on verbs used in French idiomatic expressions, and more than 1,000 additional French regular verbs conjugated like the book's model verbs.

    The 501 most commonly used Italian verbs are listed in table form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all tenses, identified by English infinitive forms. Verbs are both regular and irregular, and are presented alphabetically for easy reference. Added material related to verbs and verb usage is also presented, including lists of hundreds more regular verbs, idiomatic verb usage, and more.

    Includes new political terminology, new Russian institutions, new countries and republics and new city names. Contains 26,000 entries in the English-Russian section and 40,000 words in the Russian-English section. Irregularities in Russian declensions and conjugations appear at the beginning of each entry.

    Rare Book

    The 501 most commonly used Russian verbs are listed in table form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all tenses, identified by English infinitive forms. Verbs are both regular and irregular, and are presented alphabetically for easy reference in the Cyrillic alphabet. Added material related to verbs and verb usage is also presented, including lists of hundreds more regular verbs, idiomatic verb usage, and more.

    There are over 50,000 entries, including the most common meanings. Japanese terms are shown in romanized Japanese and standard Japanese characters. The romanized entries are listed in alphabetical order, so no knowledge of Japanese is required.

    •That brie smells funky.Ce brie sent putain de drôle.•I'm gonna get ripped!Je vais me fracasser!•I gotta piss.Je dois pisser.•The ref is fucking asshole.L'arbitre est un gros enaelé!•Wanna try doggy-style?Veux-tu faire l'amour en levrette?

    The examples use the language of real-life situations. This new edition also makes difficult topics, like the difference between mood and tense, even easier to understand. Numerous fill-in-the-blank and other exercises with delayed answers help cut down the time it takes readers to gain proficiency and confidence communicating in French.

    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.

     The summaries follow a synopsis in French and in English of what you just read, both to review the lesson and for you to see if you understood what the tale was about. At the end of those summaries, you'll be provided with a list of the most relevant vocabulary involved in the lesson, as well as slang and sayings that you may not have understood at first glance! Finally, you'll be provided with a set of tricky questions in French, providing you with the chance to prove that you learned something in the story. Don't worry if you don't know the answer to any — we will provide them immediately after, but no cheating! So look no further! Pick up your copy of French Short Stories for Beginners and start learning French right now!

    Useful and fun to read, this French phrase book is the ideal way for travelers to communicate easily and naturally.

    They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.