Clichés about The French

- French all eat frogs. And snails !
Well... Actually, frogs taste like chicken. Only with a finer flesh. And I have to remind you that we just eat their legs. Anyway, as with all clichés, it is not true for all the French. I know many folks who just can't think about eating a frog. Not to mention snails.
But it has to be said that frogs and snails are generally quite expensive, so they're eaten in good restaurants or for special occasions.
And as I'm with the weird food we French are able to eat, I must confess that I am personally responsible for the death of about a hundred gasteropods. But they taste so good with the garlic butter you put in 'em :P

- We also eat French Donuts all the time.
Sorry to disappoint, but I have no clue about what a French Donut might be... We have some bad imitation of the american donuts, but they're not as good.
Unless French Donuts are what we call beignets. Well, then... We don't eat them all the time. Actually, croissants and pains au chocolat are much more popular. Donuts are commonly associated with Mardi-Gras (which is for sure of french origin, but nowhere as crazy as in New Orleans), and enjoyed as a treat by some, but this is definitely not a feature of the French.

- And as we mention food, we seem to be baguette-crazy.
Actually, baguette is the most common type of bread. Definitely. Still... We don't eat it all the time. Generally not out of meals, anyway.
But I have to recognize that it's pretty common to eat some as "tartines" (slices of bread spread with butter and/or jam or honey, or chocolate spread...) for breakfast (oh, and guess what : we *do* dunk them into our bowl of chocolate or coffee !), sometimes the just go along with lunch, but a baguette cut in two can make an excellent basis for a sandwich, and we have some slices of bread with dinner, in general.
So, I suppose we can be defined as baguette-crazy. Still, I have to debunk a myth : we don't stop at 5pm -whatever we would be doing- to eat a whole baguette. A
(I heard this rumor from a friend in Helsinki... It was a hard time convincing him it just didn't happen)

- We are rude. And not very friendly.
No we're not. Parisians can get a bit touchy at rush hour in the Metro, but I'd say we are just like anywhere else : sometimes people are frowning for no reason, and some people are assholes. But I seriously don't think them to be the norm, neither to be a French specialty. Many French will welcome you arms wide open wherever you come from. And many French will just frown at you. People are people, in France or anywhere else...

- French girls do not shave themselves.
Some do. Actually, most of them do. And some don't. Believe me, French Girls do shave. French men shave too, actually.

- We love to smoke cigarettes.
Again, probably not more than any other people. We recently enforced a law banning smoking from public places, particularly workplaces. It will be appliable to bars and restaurants in early 2008.
The thing is, smokers aren't ashamed ofsmoking... yet. So it is (maybe) a little more visible than in the USA.
But I'd say we're much more attached to wine and drinks than to cigarette.

- We don't want to speak any other language for we are proud of our.
A case doesn't make a rule, but I'd point myself as a counter-example anyway.
Ah well... who am I trying to fool ? Actually, I admit that we aren't very good at foreign languages. We had strong policies to preserve French Culture, and these included a lot of (in my opinion) excessive measures, specially concerning movies and TV shows translations and dubbing.
There is also a problem with the way people learn English or other languages at school.
However, there are still French people who are eager to meet people from all around the world are are just doing their best to manage another (or several other) languages.
Fun fact : according to French, the American and English are the one who don't manage any other language than their own.

- We are well dressed and we look good.
Are we ?! Do we ?!

- We love stinky and moldy cheese.
And we're bloody proud of it ! Seriously, France produces about 200 or more (I didn't check) sorts of cheese, so we have to eat them somehow. Taste is what it is, but if you're disgusted by, say, the bacterias of a Roquefort, realize that your intestine contains a hell more. And they just help you being healthy. Not kidding !
We truly have something with the Cheese. And we tend to be touchy about the pasteurization of it.
Again, bacterias make it good. Pasteurization make it uniform, removes the differences between those wonders of fermentation...
Am I falling into a Cheese-loving discourse, here ?

- We have a hard language to learn.
Depends what you have as a mother tongue... But French tends to be recognized as a hard language to master, indeed... But it is worth it, isn't it ?

Call for stereotypes...

If by any chance I have any non-French reader(s), I'd be quite grateful for any stereotypes they have about the French in order to see what is real, and what is not in an article to come.

Merci !

English Grammar in French

Today, I had a conversation with an Austrian exchange student.
She is in Paris to learn about English and French, which seems a perfectly convenient choice.
But there is something she doesn't understand, and since we talked about it, neither do I.

English grammar courses are taught in French.
I just can't figure why it is so.
My first reaction could have been : "Well, it's easier this way, since we use a specific vocabulary we first acquired in junior high..."
But then, so do we in Literature or Cultural Studies. Literary criticism is done with specific terms, demographic or sociological studies are done with a vocabulary we generally heard of years ago in Geography classes...

Plus, it can be quite unsettling for the Erasmus students who honor us with their will to study English here. I mean, they could have gone to England for this purpose, still they chose France. Aren't we supposed to feel proud about that ? Aren't we supposed to try to confirm that we can indeed teach English as well as the English themselves ?

Then, is it that we feel so proud to be French that even we it's all about another language, we need to show off how good our language is ?

Or, and that might be a little too harsh but I'm seriously beginning to feel this is probably the closest answer to the truth, we don't realize that people who study English can actually understand it. When we chose to go to the University in order to learn English, do they really think it was because we felt uncapable of understanding it ?

Well, if that was the case, even though I don't delusion myself with the range of this message, we have to realize that the students who chose English want to know more about something they are already familiar with. It's never been about "English for Beginners", here.
And we, students, were able to use translated technical words in Literature or Cultural Studies, we can definitely use translated terms in Grammar and Linguistics too.
For the difference between "subject" and "sujet" is quite the same as the difference between "epithet" and "épithète" : these words are all distorted Latin.

I'm not dead. Not quite.

Sorry for the quite long time between last note and this one, I had some connection problems with Bugger.com.
"Blogger", you say ? Is it really a coincidence if both sound so close anyway ?
Whatever.

My point here is not to spit on Blogger.com, for even though it seems to be impossible to get connected to it on Firefox, MS Internet Explorer works fine.
My point here is... Hey, what is my point here ?
What could I write about ?

Let's see...
- Karate : I ain't no Chuck Norris nor am I a Jean-Claude Van Damme fan, I don't feel like looking like a martial arts nerd, and I wrote something about it on my French blog. Consider you're not missing anything.
- Watching sports live : No sir. The only exception I do to my usual motto (Watching Sports is bad, doing Sports is barely more acceptable) is some Karate practice for I have some energy to evacuate, and, I confess, watching Ice Hockey games when I have the occasion... It happened once (Finland-Sweden, in Finland), it is actually going to happen a second time (French Cup finals, wednesday). But what can I say that haven't been said a dozen thousand times ?
- Cultural differences between the French and the British : Well, for one, Frog legs are tasty. Either you can admit this opinion, then you're open-minded and I don't have to tell you about Culture Shock, or you just love French Bashing, and there's nothing I can do for you. OK, it is not that simple, and I probably could do better but I don't have much inspiration about it right now.
- Heavy Metal : well, I sure love the genre (by the way, I love the way you English-speaking people pronounce that word), but what can I say about it without making a fool of myself ? If I praise the technicalities, rocketing solos, baffling rythms, I'll sound like a snob. If I just let my guts talk about the feelings I experience from the raspy vocals, the crazed riffs... I'll sound like some kind of dope fiend.

So I'll do what many bloggers do : I'll write to say nothing.
I'll actually express Nothingness through my writings. The Nature of the Void will flow in my hollow words.
Thus, I'll be quite a poser in the Nihilist category. I can even quote Nietzsche to make myself look more nihilistic and smarter in the same time.

Praise whoever you'll feel like praising for the existence of The Blog, my friends.

And stay tuned, next time I will talk about Guinea pig's migrations through Siberia in the late VIIth century.
Or about just anything else.