French, One Curiosity at a Time
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© Channie
Description
There's no shortage of podcasts about France, but the smaller details rarely get their own spotlight. French, One Curiosity at a Time looks at French culture and language through the eyes of someone discovering it from the outside, exploring the little stories that make it so distinctive. Each episode follows a single question, idea, or cultural detail, from films and food to language, history, and everyday life, one curiosity at a time.
12 Episodes
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Can you be happy when other people are not? This past June, more than five hundred thousand French eighteen-year-olds opened an envelope with that question inside, and got four hours to answer it in writing. Philosophy is mandatory in French high school, and I've wondered for a long time what they actually learn in there. So I dug in, and then went one step further: I took this year's exam myself, cold, and had it graded the French way.
Someone on YouTube has a theory: Mandarin Chinese speakers are better at French pronunciation... unless they also speak English. Quite the emotional roller coaster for me, in about five seconds. I went up so high, because I speak Mandarin. And then I was dropped to the bottom, because I speak English too. So this episode is me checking the theory against the actual research. Turns out some of it is really true.
The French might be some of the funniest people in the world, and half the time the rest of us can't even tell. The wink never comes. This episode is me learning how much of what I'd read as rude, or maybe flirtatious, was actually a joke sailing right past me.
In Paris you ask for a pain au chocolat. Drive down to Toulouse and the exact same pastry is a chocolatine, and people there have real feelings about the difference. In this episode I talk about the names’ differences and origin, and how I ended up eating a snail pastry.
Every time I'm in France I notice it. Smoke on every terrace, smoke coming through the restaurant window, a lot more than I'm used to in the US. This episode I finally looked into it. Why?
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