For those who have travelled to nations abroad where the language spoken is not the mother tongue, they most certainly have a hilarious tale of when their pidgin Spanish/Mandarin/Urdu did not elicit quite the desired response, and in some extreme cases—solicited prostitution. Most frequently it’s a cute slip of the tongue—saying you’re pregnant instead having had elegant sufficiency—or sometimes an embarrassing idiom in a pharmacy—the French term for athlete’s foot is champignons.
There are many ways of learning a foreign language but so few make the experience enjoyable. Daphnée: Your Lovely French Teacher is a fun and interactive iPhone application that uses videos of a coquettish Parisienne—Daphnée—to give you a personalised tour through the Gallic language and the nation’s capital. While it won’t teach the finer points of irregular verb conjugation or how to master the subjunctive tense—something some French are yet to achieve—Daphnée will teach the basics of conversational speech that should lighten the burden of linguistic navigation around the City of Lights.
The app is free to download from the iTunes App Store and each of the six lessons costs 99 cents to install, making it an affordable introduction to colloquial and conversational French. The pace is a little speedy so a prior knowledge of the basics is recommended, but it sure beats a tacky phrase book when attempting to drague someone in a boîte.
Published on 16 February 2011 by Agony Uncle