What's to eat?

When you are in France you will need to eat so let's start to build your vocabulaire relating to foods.
 

If you don't eat you will be hungry or famished. The French word for hungry is faim. If there is no food to eat there would be a famine and everyone would be famished.

hungry = faim

Fortunately there are lots of foods in France which you can order using your English vocabulaire.

apricot = abricot

bacon (rashers) = bacon

beef = bœff

chocolate = chocolat

crab = crabe

juice = jus

mayonnaise = mayonnaise

menu = menu

mustard = moutard

omelette = omelette

onion = oignon

orange = orange

peach = pêche

pepper = poivre

pork = porc

pizza = pizza

quiche = quiche

restaurant = restaurant

salad = salade

salt = sel

sandwich = sandwich

sardine = sardine

sauce = sauce

souffle = soufflé

soup = soupe

spagetti = spagetti

vanilla = vanille

vinegar = vinaigre

vitamin = vitamine

The word for salt is sel which you may think is considerably different.

English words which will assist you to remember it is sel are saline and desalination.

One of the rules introduced in Franglais was that words ending in ~able are often the same. However there are exceptions and vegetable is one of them. Vegetables are légumes.

The Amercians call courgettes zuchinni whilst the English call them courgettes which is the same in French. Similarly egg-plant is American for aubergine.

aubergine = aubergine

courgette = courgette

Many French restaurants use the word auberge in their name. Auberge means an inn.

Mnemonic: All French inns serve aubergines

When you eat, you may want a glass of wine. The word for wine is vin. Grapes grow on vines in a vinyard. The French pronunciation of vin is more like “van”.

The word for a grape-vine is a vigne.

Vinegar is often made from wine and bad wine tastes like vinegar.

auberge = inn

wine = vin

grape vine = vignes

Franglais - learning French vocabulary from the English you already know.

In the first post I explained how I ended up here. The 1,000 word challenge to learn a 1,000 foreign words is in fact a simple challenge if you want to learn French.  It's possible to learn about 2,000 French words in 1 hour.  I'm surprised schools fail to teach these simple techniques to children.

The English language is in fact made up of many thousands of French words. 

So let's start with a real simple rule.  Most English words ending in ~able are the same.

table
comfortable
acceptable
enjoyable
agreeable

The French pronunciation is different of course.

Take comfortable. Cum-fort-bl The French pronunciation is Cum-for-taar-b-le

With this simple rule,  there are 72 words which you've instantly acquired. Of course there are exceptions.

Words in English beginning with un~ are in~ instead so “insociable” is “unsociable”. There is only one exception to this un~ to in~  prefix which unanimous (unanime). This rule does not apply to words starting uni~.

If you are stuck, use the rule that all words finishing in ~able are the same will help you get talking, but be aware that there are exceptions. For example uninhabitable is inhabitable in French. Completely the opposite meaning!

The 1,000 Words challenge

This week saw the launch of the 1,000 Words challenge by Speak to the Future.

Britain has a reputation for being poor at learning foreign languages and the purpose of the campaign is to encourage people to learn 1,000 words of another language.

I think this is a great idea. I enjoy learning foreign languages and agree that the British shouldn't be so lazy and take it for granted that we can speak English when abroad.

The goal of learning  1,000 words of another language would give someone a reasonable vocabulary to to do a reasonable number of tasks. Pareto principle when applied to language is that about 800 words form about 80% of words used in normal conversation. Unfortunately the remaining 20% is made up of about 10,000 other words!

One of the reasons why I think the British are poor at second languages is the poor standard of teaching at schools. I certainly don't have fond memories of learning French at school, in fact I'm amazed looking back that I passed with a good grade. It is only after leaving school and experiencing the world that I've realised that there are other ways to learn a language.

Grammar is critical to language. The 1000 word challenge is all about learning vocabulary yet to use a language you need grammar. With grammar it's possible to communicate very powerful concepts with a limited vocabulary. In fact with only about 500 words you can convey some very adult and complex thoughts.

One of my interests in etymology (the study of language).  I became interested in etymology when I was living in Japan.  When you are a native English speaker you are buried in the language and fail to see it but when I was immersed in a different culture, suddenly English seemed quite odd and I began to ask myself why is it that word? Certain words which once seemed natural suddenly felt  odd and that they shouldn't be there!

I then started to realise that English is in fact mostly made up of words that are not English. German, French, Greek and other language proliferate throughout the English language. 

This has led me to want to help others to learn foreign languages through simple rules.  Cheating if you like.  If English is full of French then it's easy to teach a native English speaker to learn French since they already know thousands of French words. Simple!

Welcome to Franglais.