Product Description

A saucy guide to survival in everyday French. With chapters on insults, sex, drink and those expressive Gallic gestures, this book reveals the necessary vocabulary, explains its proper use and gives examples and exercises for the eager student.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34141 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

An indispensable tool for advanced french learners (adults!)
Recommended by my funky french teacher a few years ago, this book has become my bible during my stay in France. It's amuzing illustrations and highly up-to-date content, not to mention it's crudeness, have caused many a laugh among my french colleagues. It covers a wide variety of topic areas from body parts to baby french and gives you useful phrases to learn at the end of each chapter. If you're off to France, don't get left behind because this is the real french you'll need to know to survive!

génial
A handy and thorough book about French slang phrases, covering most of the slang and typical relaxed sentence structures from everyday French speech as contrasted with the formal type we learn first at school and in textbooks, as well as some less common, and often amusing, examples of colourful phrases.

As to complaints here about lack of pronunciation guidance or copious examples of use - I'd say this book is aimed at people of about A-level standard or more, who already have a good grasp of standard French. Anyone else would glean a few useful tips from it, but not take it all in. As a graduate in French, I think it would have served me well if I'd read this before going to France in my gap year before uni. Even now, reading it, there are some expressions I'd not seen before, along with many old favourites.

Some of the content is a bit on the strong side, but that's part of the point!
Also, bear in mind some of the advice on how to speak like a native is helpful and practical (t'es sympa instead of tu es sympa; j'sais pas instead of je ne sais pas), but there are times when even in speech you might want to sound more 'text book' and less 'street'. It all depends on context.

Excellent
Excellent if you are also doing a French course... I bought the book a year ago, and I initially found it a bit dull... only when I started a course to brush up my French did I realise how good the selection of words in this book is. You don't get many dialogues or expressions in context, though, and not all vocabulary areas are covered. Although it is not perfect, I am giving it a five star rating because you should not miss this book. A similar book I'd recommend is "Le français familier et argotique", also available from Amazon.