Product Description

This essential dictionary and phrase book provides every term you need to know when buying, maintaining, renovating or building a home in France. Accessible and comprehensive, it includes the technical words you won't find in an ordinary dictionary for tools and equipment and every aspect of painting, carpentry, roofing, plumbing and drainage. It also equips you with terminology for planning structural changes such as extensions and determining boundaries. An appendix of emergency phrases will make this a book you'll want to keep by the phone at all times. Whether you own a home or work in France, this book will help you talk to French tradesmen with authority and avoid costly misunderstandings as you pull down the language barrier brick by brick.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38388 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-05
• Released on: 2006-04-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Living France Magazine, August 2006
... plain alphabeticalised sailing. There are key words for every possible scenario. ...this is what we have all been waiting for.

Living France magazine
This is what we have all been waiting for.

The Mail on Sunday
The practical know-how to turn your pie-in-the-sky scheme into
reality.

Customer Reviews

We could have done with this book years ago!
This book even makes good bedtime reading. We have found it most useful and now even know the French names of building and decorating items we don't even need. I particularly liked the breakdown of terms into easily definable areas of renovation. Keep a copy in the car for handy reference, you never know when one needs a pied-de-biche.

helpful for DIY
Very useful for basic building materials and tools but really only for DIY use. If you're doing a complete refurb with French builders or setting up your trade in France then spend a bit more money on the "Concise Dictionary of House Building Terms", don't be frightened by the price, it's well worth it. I own both copies and this one stays on the bookshelf most of the time, and the other is on site or in the van.

Helpful.. if you have time on your hands.
We purchased this before we moved to France to help us obtain quotations etc., on a property we own. The book is in ten sections of different trades - not in alphabetical order - so if you want a word, you have to hunt through all the ten sections to find the right one, if it is there at all. This may be OK going from English to French, but if you have a French word and you don't know which trade it comes under (because you don't know the word, right?) you are left hunting between the ten sections and your regular dictionary as well. If at the back there was a complete list of French to English, then English to French as well as the ten sections, It would be getting 5 stars, however it doesn't so it fails as a dictionary, as it's not in alphabetical order. Shame.