Bedtime reading and listening

Last night we took the Bluetooth speaker to bed with us along with the iPod and we settled down to the first part of a French-speaking audio course.

Mr L's French is a lot better than mine (I failed my O level twice, getting a worse grade the second time) but he is as concerned as I am about getting up to speed before we go away in the Autumn. We really want to speak French as much as we can, thereby improving all the time we are away and hopefully being quite fluent by the time that we come home again next year.

The course is quite interesting in as much as it is nothing like language learning at school was. It is strictly about speaking, not writing and rests heavily on a relaxed repetitive method. Most interesting to me is the toolkit approach and the way that the course introduces one to the idea that French is easy if one speaks English already as so many of our words come from French anyway. Startlingly simple facts (shortcuts) that never occurred to me before -  such as all English words that end in -ible or -able are the same word in French (though pronounced in a "French way") and words that end in -al in English can be transformed into French by changing the ending to -ique (e.g. political = politique)

It makes it all sound very easy indeed. 

The first lesson took the beginner on an extraordinary journey that culminated in constructing quite  a lengthy sentence by deduction from these and other "rules". Not that it took we Intermediates to anywhere we had not been before.  I do think that I learned quite a bit regarding pronunciation though and my confidence is already creeping upwards. That and the fact that I can now confidently reserve a dinner table for two and enquire if the restaurant atmosphere is romantic (romantique). :-)

C'est vrai!


In a very timely fashion, the copy of France Passion that we had recently ordered arrived in this morning's post. I have been setting up our online account and Mr L has already picked out our first stop. In fact he has our first three nights sorted, though only one stop comes from the book.

France Passion, for the uninitiated, is a directory of overnight stops for motorhomes (known in France as campingcars). It is somewhat like the Britstops book but is longer established and seems to be altogether better organised and properly thought-out. It also relies heavily on farms and vineyards, rather than hostelries as the Britstops book does. The stopovers are exclusively for the use of France Passion members.

Our chosen first France Passion stop is an organic orchard and dairy farm, selling organic produce: cider, cow's cheese, preserves etcetera. Mr L has worked out where to buy the bread before we arrive and tuck into the Mimolette.


https://www.france-passion.com


France Passion is added to our existing ACSI membership https://www.campingcard.co.uk/ and the imminently due "All the Aires" book https://www.vicarious-shop.com/All-the-Aires-France-north-and-south.html which means that we just about have all our bases covered.

There is nothing like forward planning, eh?  At least we have something interesting to do when not tidying, cleaning, DIY-ing or painting!