Merde!: The Real French You Were Never Taught at School
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews | Author: Genevi Eve List Price: £6.80 Our Price: £6.67 You Save: £0.13 (2%) Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours  |
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 | Product Details: Paperback 112 pages Release Date: 21 December 1998 Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD ISBN: 0684854279 Rating:   Sales Rank: 4337 | | Look for similar books by subject:
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| | Customer Reviews: Synopsis (16 September 2008)Not an exhaustive or scholarly dictionary of 'argot', but a saucy guide to survival in everyday French as it is really spoken. Includes chapters on love, sex, food and drink, expressing anger and insults Good Fun! Useful?-Probably (23 September 2007)Any author of this type of book is on a hiding to nothing - the readership is likely to stretch from the purient schoolboy to the scholarly student! This book treads a good middle ground, with plently of gutter language, but with a hefty nod towards the correct grammar and pronunciation. It's not all gutter language - that would make a very dull book - but it includes plenty of colloquialisms too. The reader or student of this type of book is very much in the hands of the writer not to lead them into social difficulties (!) and the author of Merde! tries to help by grading the language from zero to two stars! However, I do wonder if the author has a prudish streak because there seem to be tranches of the English language that are not mentioned (do French women not menstruate?!). There is also a danger of this type of book becoming out of date - and again the reader would be unaware of the changing language - with the potential for gaffes in use. There are occasional curiosities , leading one to wondr why the inclusion - eg bistro. Furthermore, I am unsure whether the book is aimed at the British or American market - the author is clearly English, but there are occasional americanisms thrown in, which make it a strange read for an Englishman, but there are insufficient to make it a useful tome for an American. Hoepfully the next edition will include an A-Z reference so that a term can be referenced back to a given page (eg Merde - see page 99 etc); perhaps a section on internet / email / txt speak might also be entertaining and potentially useful as well. Entertaining. (20 December 2006)This book is entertaining to leaf through every so often, paritcularly if you might be visiting France any time soon! You do, however, require previous knowledge of French grammar if you want to be able to use your newly learned words effectively. It's great if you want to yell at someone, baffling them so much they're unable to retalliate. Even if you don't want to use the vocabulary (which includes phrases such as "to tear one another's guts out" and "to have it off"), it's still quite an amusing read. The French you really wanted to know... and spanish too (18 February 2001)I've had the UK version of this book for years, as well as the sequel "Merde Encore" and the Spanish version "mierda". I couldn't believe my luck. Instant credibility in a few hours reading. I've shown it to many friends and it has been a universal hit. If it was used as a text book in schools, the interest and uptake of foreign languages would be much higher! | |
