Learn French podcasts

[WindReaver]

I just found this on reddit and thought I would share it for those learning French. Looks like it would be something good to put on the 'ol iPod.

(I really should get an iPod one of these days... )

Coffee Break French (and Nine Other Ways to Parler Français)

[Tye]

Thanks for sharing!

[garçoncanadien]

hi everybody

update me on how its going with the French lessons
i see my lessons have more views than last time

[Cooney]

On they go, on they go :-P

At work yesterday it was a bit slow, so I pulled out a new box of French flash cards, and went through all 1000 of them. Overall I'd say I was about 75% on them - I got my butt kicked by names of specific foods and preparation styles for them, as well as names for medical conditions and their treatments. If you dropped the food and medical categories, I was around 85-90% :-) Heck, one of the foods was a cognate, and I'd never even heard of it in English. I have to find it and look it up :-P

[fsquared]

Originally Posted by Cooney

On they go, on they go :-P

At work yesterday it was a bit slow, so I pulled out a new box of French flash cards, and went through all 1000 of them. Overall I'd say I was about 75% on them - I got my butt kicked by names of specific foods and preparation styles for them, as well as names for medical conditions and their treatments. If you dropped the food and medical categories, I was around 85-90% :-) Heck, one of the foods was a cognate, and I'd never even heard of it in English. I have to find it and look it up :-P

Awesome, that's great vocab drilling.
So, what food was it?

[Cooney]

Originally Posted by fsquared

Awesome, that's great vocab drilling.
So, what food was it?

It was endive. As I discovered upon consultation with an associate, endive is a type of ruffage used in good salads, and which France is the world's leading grower of. I don't like green leafy things in my food, so it makes sense for me not to know it, but I was still surprised.

[fsquared]

Aha. I knew that endive was a kind of salad green but I couldn't, say, pick it out from a mixed salad. Have you ever seen Kissing Jessica Stein? There's a priceless scene with a blind date involving salad greens.

[rcs]

Funny, I had friends in California that were vegetarians. I remember them saying that they would have to adjust to eating meat again when they visited France. Greens back in style in France, or was this just an illusion of France being big meat-eaters?

[fsquared]

Dunno for sure about the French, but certainly in Eastern Europe it was pretty darned hard to be vegetarian, say, 15 years ago. In Hungary it was like "chunks of slightly meaty lard, fried in melted lard" as a typical snack. I have a Balkan cookbook that has a list of chapters that goes something like:

"Meat dishes"
"Ground meat dishes"
"Roasted meat dishes"
"Meat and vegetable dishes"
"Offal dishes" <- this one is not for the faint of heart
...
and way down at the bottom, nestled somewhere between "Soups" and "Desserts", is a little section on "Vegetarian dishes".

Anyone had "tête de veau"? Apparently calf's head is quite the French delicacy, and offal dishes are a substantial part of French cuisine too.

[Cooney]

Well, I haven't been there or anything, but my pretty current street-French/culture book says that vegetarianism is quite rare there.