Difficulty: Beginner
France
Tune in to Patricia's lesson on musical expressions and idioms in French. You'll hear plenty of interesting phrases that are worth noting.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
En avant la musique! (Let's get on with it!) Patricia continues her lesson on various musical expressions used in everyday language.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Patricia breaks down some more musical expressions, such as c'est la même musique, c'est du pipeau, violon d'Ingres, and si ça te chante.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
To conclude her series on musical expressions, Patricia will sing your praises for having learned and practiced everything she taught you.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
It took two hundred years to standardize French spelling before it could be taught in schools using a method called la dictée (dictation), in which a student writes out the words he or she hears. As a matter of fact, this is the exact same principle behind Yabla's Scribe game!
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Patricia explains the importance of dictation exercises for learning French. Now an essential teaching tool in the classroom, dictation was originally a pastime for French nobility. The author Prosper Mérimée created a dictation exercise for Empress Eugénie that stumped even the brightest intellectuals. Think you can beat them? Try it yourself here.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Patricia explains the multiple benefits of dictation exercises. Having fallen out of favor in recent years, dictation is making a comeback after the French Ministry of Education realized that language skills were deteriorating. Why not take full advantage of Yabla's Scribe game to improve those skills?
Difficulty: Beginner
France
The first of April is the day of hoaxes, pranks, and jokes. In France, the tradition is to hang paper fish on people's backs and shout, "Poisson d'avril!" (April Fish!).
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Patricia explores the origin of the poisson d'avril (April Fools') tradition. There are numerous theories about this, some of them contradictory.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Using her favorite fruits as examples, Patricia demonstrates some different ways of saying you "like" or "love" something in French.
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Patricia will teach you how to say that you don't like something in tactful ways and in more direct ways. There are many interesting expressions to convey dislike, even disgust, but you might want to save some of them for private conversations.
Difficulty: Intermediate
France
Victor Hugo is best known for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, but he also wrote numerous poems. In this video, Patricia reads an excerpt from his poem "À l'Arc de Triomphe," in which he pays tribute to the city of Paris.
Difficulty: Newbie
France
Patricia explains the basic principles of French numbers and their usage, and shares a few grammatical points.
Difficulty: Newbie
France
In part two of her lesson on numbers, Patricia counts from 41 to 100 in French. Be prepared to do some arithmetic!
Difficulty: Beginner
France
Humanity has always dreamed of flying through the air. That dream was made possible with the arrival of the zeppelin at the end of the nineteenth century.
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