[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
It’s July 14th! France’s Independence Day falls just 10 days (and 13 years) after our own in the U.S., and the holiday incites as much national pride and festivity as does the 4th of July in the States.
Celebration •  Vocabulary
La Fête Nationale
La Fête Nationale, better known to us as [...]

Films are an integral art of French culture. France is famous for festivals, most notably the one at Cannes, and for producing edgy movies that are subtitled or dubbed to be replayed around the world.
If you happen to be in the right place at the right time to check out a film festival in [...]

“So, where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”

-Christina Aguilera
(She’ll never live that one down.)
Le Festival de Cannes
As most of us are well aware, the Festival de Cannes is an annual film festival held in the town of (you guessed it!) Cannes, France.  The event takes place each year (usually in May) at the [...]

In the States, May Day means classrooms full of elementary school students simultaneously weaving paper baskets, constructing tissue-paper flowers to put inside, and (after school) placing the baskets on a doorstep, ringing the doorbell, and running away while leaving behind the home-made surprise.
This tradition of flower-giving began in France as a way of marking the [...]

Happy Easter![Audio clip: view full post to listen]
As in many other countries in the world, Easter is a holiday observed in France by both religious and non-religious people.  France is still a largely Catholic country, and even those who don’t regularly attend mass throughout the year will go to church on Easter Suday, or Pâques.
Many [...]

I know, I know, April Fools’ Day was last week, but the French version is just too funny not to mention.
In France, April Fools’ Day is known as poisson d’avril, or the fish of April.
Where we’re more apt to employ whoopi cushions and plastic spiders, French youth have a different tradition: schoolchildren will stick a [...]

LES RUES DE PARIS: PARTIE TROIS – THE STREETS OF PARIS: PART THREE   [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Well, I made Part One and Part Two, so why not round it off with Part Three?  There’s always some tidbit of information that I can’t fit into a given lesson, and there’s usually [...]