Un Point c'est tout

🏛 The “Académie française”, the French language headquarters, the linguistic mother ship… Or is it really? Since the 17th century, the forty “immortels” (members of the Academy) have ruled the language. But for a few decades now, their power and influence have been heavily challenged. After all, the francophone world has changed quite a bit in four centuries.

🔗 Official website of the Académie française: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🥊 When the body and the mind merge into one ultimate sport, we get chessboxing. Six rounds of chess, five rounds of boxing. But who came up with such an unusual discipline? Turns out, it was first imagined in a French comic book from the eighties: la “Trilogie Nikopol” by Enki Bilal…

🎬 Watch Redbull's documentary on chessboxing: https://youtu.be/VZzj4ICKsF4

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🚄 Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the TGV, Train à Grande Vitesse (high-speed) (subtitles are available in French and English by clicking on the CC button on the YouTube control bar). The first trip from Paris to Lyon was made possible in 1981 by years of research on how to double the speed of regular trains. Nowadays, the speed has even tripled, reaching over 500 km/h on some lines. It goes pretty much everywhere in Europe, it is green, smooth and there is wifi. Would you like to try it on your next trip?

🔗 Why the US has no high-speed rail? (CNBC): https://youtu.be/Qaf6baEu0_w

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

💇‍♀️ Above every “haute couture” chef d’œuvre, there is a “haute coiffure” tour de force. With the Paris Fashion Week approaching (September 26), let’s give a shoutout to the hair artists by exploring the history of hairstyles in France and Europe. Very much linked to social status and heritage in the old days, haircuts have drastically evolved over time. (Sometimes in funny ways.) But do they still reveal much about someone’s background nowadays?

🔗 Site de la Haute Coiffure Française - Paris: https://www.hautecoiffurefrancaiseparis.com/

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🎹 What do Quincy Jones, George Gershwin and Astor Piazzolla have in common? You guessed right, their music professor: Nadia Boulanger. But what made a jazz, a classical music and a tango master travel all the way to Paris to study with her? And to be honest, there are plenty more composers who flew and sailed from far away to meet her, like Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein, Michel Legrand,… Discover in this episode what made “Mademoiselle” Boulanger the Yoda of modern music.

🎬 Watch Bruno Monsaingeon's "Mademoiselle" (1977), a documentary about Nadia Boulanger (in French with English subtitles): https://youtu.be/V2GX69XxxyE

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

👅 How many French words do you use on a daily basis? Well, rest assured, francophones use A TON of English words all the time, it sounds cool. And they are going even one step further: using old French words passed to the English vocabulary, back into French with an English accent. Think “tennis” :). This is the weekly episode about the real Frenglish (subtitles are available in French and English by clicking on the CC button on the YouTube control bar). Now it’s your turn to get those words back into English for a next round!

🎬 This video might help contextualize: le français et l’anglais (https://youtu.be/_xr24RkQbTY)

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🎥 Let’s kick off the new school year with a cult film about kids in school. And what a film! This 1959 semi-biographical master piece from the French New Wave by François Truffaut was nominated for an Oscar, as well as the Palme d’Or in Cannes, and is #9 in TimeOut’s 100 best French movies of all time ( https://www.timeout.com/paris/en/film/best-french-movies ). There are countless rankings online that put "The 400 Blows" at the top, but it’s always better to watch, or rewatch it and share your opinion with us.

🎬 Watch The 400 Blows on Youtube US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvjUhgtn_-U

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🏛 Art deco, like modernism, was much more than an architectural movement, it was almost a lifestyle. It shaped the outside and the inside of many buildings and mansions of the first half of the 20th century, and it was also directly connected to the birth of cubism and futurism and many other art movements. Here is a short episode about the style that was born in Western Europe and expanded worldwide.

📕 Modernisme & Art déco, Louis-Philippe Breydel, Sandra Caltagirone, Alice Editions, 2004

☝️ If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🇫🇷 French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

🌍 Do you like games? Do you like the French language? Then this might interest you: les Jeux de la francophonie. Every four years — with flexibility in case of worldwide pandemic —, French-speaking countries around the world send their best young athletes and artists to compete in a fantastic cultural celebration. Next destination: Kinshasa 2022.

🇫🇷 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

🔗 Find more info about the Games on https://www.jeux.francophonie.org/Here is a little presentation video for the 2022 games in Kinshasa: https://youtu.be/BBX25z-Jb0w

ℹ️ French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider:

French Conversation Group meets weekly in Los Angeles, New York or online. It's meant for non native speakers (beginners, intermediate, advanced) to practice their French and have fun. You're more than welcome to join! Check out this link for more info: https://www.frenchconversationgroup.com