Speak French in seconds
Instant! French
Nick Theobald & Denis La Touche
Published for the Internet by eBookIt.com
©2009 Nick Theobald & Denis La Touche
ISBN: 978-1-4566-0023-5
First printing. 2009.
Acknowledgements:
Proofing: Jean-Pierre Gautier.
Cover design: Russell Chambers, [email protected]
This book is copyright. Except for reasonable purposes of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproductions may be made, whether
by photocopying or by any other means, unless permission has been granted by the publishers. So watch it.
We’ll be onto you in an Instant!
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Simon Johnston, 1956-2009.
Speak French in seconds
This little book is your passport to speaking French.
Instant! French contains thousands of practical, street-wise and occasionally risqué phrases and words.
Everything from “Don’t step in that dog shit,” to “Hello, I’d like to join the French Foreign Legion.”
Millions of us studied le français at school, so why not re-discover this beautiful language?
When you are in France, speaking French is not only polite, it’s important from a business and social perspective: you may just get better snails too.
Many phrase books require a degree in linguistics to pronounce their words and phrases - we use simple phonetics.
Thanks for buying our book. One author fancies a chateau on the Loire, while
the other one needs more conflict- free diamonds to grace his imaginary girlfriends’ fingers.
How Instant! phonetics work
With Instant! French, what you see is what you say.
English: I love you.
French: Je t’aime.
Phonetics: Je tame.
Je - as in the first sound of Zhivago.
tame - my dog is tame.
English: After you.
French: Après vous.
Phonetics: Ah-pray voo.
Ah - as in Ah-choo!
pray - what you do in church.
voo - as in the voo of voodoo.
English: Thank you very much.
French: Merci beaucoup.
Phonetics: Mair-see bow-coo.
Mair - sounds like fair.
see - see what we mean.
bow - bow & arrows.
coo - what pigeons say.
English: Excuse me.
French: Excusez moi.
Phonetics: Excuse-zay mwa.
Excuse - as in excuse me.
zay - same sound as say.
mwa - the sound humans make when air-kissing.
English: I’ve got a hangover.
French: J’ai une gueule de bois.
Phonetics: Zhay oon girl de bwa.
Zhay - the Zh of Zhivago plus an ay (same as “say”).
oon - like moon.
girl - as in girl.
de - the de of department.
bwa - the air-kissing “mwa” with a b.
English: She’s not here.
French: Elle n’est pas là.
Phonetics: Elle nay pa la.
Elle - as in the magazine ‘Elle’.
nay - that’s right, ‘nay’.
pa - the pa of ‘papa’.
la - same sound as pa.
The Le & La of French: It’s a gender thing
Like many languages, French contains masculine and feminine words.
(That’s right! The masculine words are rough ‘n tough and the feminine words display a better attitude towards personal grooming. Or vice versa.)
The definite article “The” and the indefinite article “A” are identified as follows:
The masculine The is written as Le.
The feminine The is written as La.
The masculine A is written as Un.
The feminine A is written as Une.
Class dismissed.
Please read these bits care-full-lee
Our phrase book uses phonetics to ensure correct pronunciation.
We’ve hyphen-a-ted the phonetics of most words of more than one syllable, to make them easier to pro-nounce.
Phrase books and phonetics will never give you perfect vowel sounds, intonation, stress, length of words, emphasis, etc.
However…I’ve found that if
