French has two words for each of the following: year, day, morning, and evening, and they cause no end of difficulties for non-native speakers. Why is it that English can get away with one word when French needs two? The answer
French has two words for each of the following: year, day, morning, and evening, and they cause no end of difficulties for non-native speakers. Why is it that English can get away with one word when French needs two? The answer lies in how you look at these temporal markers.
Students often ask "how can I sound more French?" and my first recommendation is always to work on vocabulary. In French classes, you tend to learn the most common, basic terms, like bon, which is a typical and very useful adjective that tends to be overused. Read this lesson to learn some different ways to say "good," including how to pronounce them.
In both French and English, there's a lot of overlap between fractions and ordinals: the vast majority of these two types of numbers share the same word. In English, they are identical from "third" on up, while in French they're the same starting with cinquième.
Talking on the phone can be trickier than face-to-face conversations, for a couple of reasons. The lack of gestures and facial expressions means there are no visual hints to help you understand, plus there's something about the phone that makes certain sounds more difficult to distinguish. Knowing some standard phone formulas will help your brain fill in any comprehension gaps.