Le Petit Prince

"It’s for both, I think. It’s not too big. It can be your first achievement when it comes to reading a French book, it’s less than 100 pages. It’s a bit like for me, when I was younger, the first book I read in English was The Old Man and the Sea . That’s around 100 pages as well. It can be the first time you read a whole book in French. Also, Le Petit Prince is very poetic. If you lose a little bit the path of the story, there are many other stories. Maybe you will understand some parts and not others, but you can still like it and enjoy it. I tried Babel and Duolingo but personally I am not a huge fan. These apps are a bit frustrating because you’re forced to follow a track that is the algorithm of the app. If you want to go back to what you did two days ago, you’re not able to. In the end, with a book, you do your own algorithm. If you want to do 10 stories, and then go back to the second story, you can. You can just do whatever you want. “Many methods are very boring and difficult, and others are pretty exciting” There is one app I love but it’s a bit geeky and not that well known. It’s called AnkiApp . It’s a flashcard app and you add cards to learn words. The design is very simple and it’s not very beautiful, but the algorithm is very impressive. You have the flashcard and you say, ‘Okay, I know the word a bit/too much/not at all and then, depending on your answer, you have it back in 10 minutes or later that day, the next day, or a week later. You can learn a lot of sentences and small sentences and words with this app. You can build your own cards, but you can also share your cards online and people share their cards. So if you want the 1,000 first words in Chinese with audio, you can find them. But you do need to upload cards and it’s not super easy to use. At the beginning of the first lockdown, I signed up to Verbling and had a conversation every day. I had three different teachers. I was just doing conversation for fun in English and a bit in Spanish. So there’s Verbling and there’s also italki , which is pretty much the same kind of platform. It’s not too expensive and it’s a way to be able to get in touch with native speakers instantly. So that’s really, really cool. There’s Emily in Paris , a TV show on Netflix. People complain about it a lot here in France. They say it’s a lot of clichés but, personally, I really like it. it’s promoting Paris and French culture. French people always complain about everything but I’m happy that Netflix invests in Paris. The series is in English but with Netflix, you can adjust the language or subtitles. I’m not amazing with languages. I speak Spanish , but I learned it at school. I’m okay in German, but I’m not amazing. I’ve tried many times to learn languages, but then I forget. I did an internship when I was 22 in China. So I learned a bit of Chinese but I don’t remember it. Chinese is so different—when you learn Chinese, you realize how similar European languages are in the structure, the words. It’s interesting because high school teachers only talk about false friends. In the end, the false friends are maybe 100-200 words, while there are 20,000 real friends. In my book I don’t have any false friends, I totally avoid them. Instead, I focus on the real friends. In France, we have two hours for lunch. A long time ago I used to work in the automotive industry. The team was German, French and English. For the English team, lunch was only 15 minutes with a sandwich in front of the computer. The Germans had one hour and the French had two. It’s a very different style. Here are some sentences with transparent words that help explain the context: « Le train arrive dans six minutes à la station Opéra » « J’invite mes parents et mes cousins à diner au restaurant » « Le journaliste interviewe le président de la République » « Paul décide de changer de direction »"