This is the trailer for the up and coming Rendez-vous with French Cinema event which stops in London from 4 – 7th April. Films this year will be shown at Cine Lumiere and Curzon Soho. All the screenings will feature exclusive Q&As with directors and actors. Films will be shown in the original French with English subtitles so you can test your knowledge!
To kick start the festival on Thursday 4th of April, the Cine Lumiere will host In The House, with an exclusive on-stage interview with star Kristin Scott Thomas at 5pm. Populaire, directed by Régis Roinsard, will be screened at the Curzon Soho the same evening. A Q&A with the director and actors Déborah François and Romain Duris will take place afterwards.
The following evening, Thérèse Desqueyroux will be shown at the Curzon Soho, and followed by a Q&A with Audrey Tautou, best known for Amelie.
In addition, Cine Lumiere will also be holding a French Classics season each Sunday from 31st March, starting with Les Valseuses.
It’s the Oscars at the end of this month, so now is the time to catch the nominees for Best Foreign Film, and judge for yourself which is the best candidate!
Up this year are 5 nominees:
Blog readers will know that I’m a big fan of using foreign films as a language learning tool, and as a student of Spanish, I will be going to see No this weekend (it doesn’t hurt that it has Gael Garcia Bernal in, either!) Here’s the trailer:
Youtube has added some more languages to its ‘translate captions’ service. Six European languages will now join the existing English, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. These appear automatically in videos when you click on the “turn on captions” button at the bottom of the video. This doesn’t apply to music videos. The subtitles are generated using Google Voice (voice recognition technology.)
If you discover an error, there are ways to submit corrections. Google are also working on a new feature to translate the subtitles into other languages.
For now, you can use subtitles in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, which is great if you’re learning any of these languages. Find a video in the language you’re learning and try it out!
November 15, 2012 at 12:20 am
· Filed under Culture, French · Posted by Emma
We’re halfway through the 20th anniversary of this year’s nationwide French Film Festival, and already we’ve seen gala screenings of Asterix et Obelix: Au Service de Sa Majeste, starring Gerard Depardieu.
This year, you can test your French listening skills all around England and Scotland; with screenings in Bristol, Manchester, Warwick, London, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh.
If you’re learning Québécois, there are 5 films for you to choose from, including Starbuck, a comedy which was a box office hit in Canada.
In addition, Amour is on national release from tomorrow (although it’s not part of the festival!)
Ed Manley and James Cheshire from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), were busy this summer. The two researchers collected data from 3.3 million tweets during the London 2012 Games, using Twitter’s API. They then created an impressive looking map of all of the locations of those tweets. Not only that, but the map is colour coded for each language. The grey parts of the map were tweets in English, which makes up the majority of it. There are pockets of colour elsewhere though, in descending order representing Spanish (white), French (red), Turkish (blue), Arabic (green), Portuguese (purple), German (orange), Italian (yellow), Malay (cyan), and Russian (violet). There were 66 languages used, identified and recorded. The languages tweeted least were Georgian, Belarusian, Telugu and Armenian.
Ed Manley explains that Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines, was excluded from the data as “many of these classifications included just uses of English terms such as ‘hahahahaha’, ‘ahhhhhhh’ and ‘lololololol’.” It was initially the 7th most tweeted language.
They are quick to point out that the work absolutely isn’t a true representation of the diverse demographic of London. A lot of tweets are located on main roads and along train lines. Also, they have only included tweeters who have a good GPS location and are connected to the internet.
French (along with English) is the official language of the Olympics, yet has been used sparingly in London for these Games. The only usage I’ve noticed is that all the official speeches at the opening Ceremony were given in French first, then English. Certainly all the newly erected official signs on the streets here in London are in English.
Have you ever wondered WHY the official language of the Olympics is French? Shouldn’t it be primarily the language of the host country?
The answer is that the official language is primarily French as it is the language of the International Olympic Committee. The IOC headquarters is in Lausanne, a French speaking city in Switzerland. More specifically, it’s in honour of the founder of the Olympic Committee, Paris born Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who is considered the “father” of the Olympic Games.
Other French language Olympic facts:
23 nations participating in the Olympics have French as an official language
French and English are the official languages of the Olympic Charter (the rules which govern the Games) – however in the case of discrepancies, French takes precedence!
Gilbert Fellim, the IOC’s Olympic Games Executive Director, says that French is always to be used during opening ceremonies and medal presentations.
January 5, 2012 at 2:52 pm
· Filed under French · Posted by Emma
Francophiles and French language students, here’s your opportunity to immerse yourself in all things French. The France Show will be exhibiting at Earls Court, London, from 13-15th January.
There will be food, wine, entertainment, and a chance to win a trip to France so you can practise your French!
Tickets are £10 in advance, and £13 on the door. There’s also a two tickets for £13 deal here.
Does anyone else like to use foreign language films to help build their knowledge? As a world cinema fan, I have quite a few in my collection, and as a Spanish language student, I feel it’s in my best interests to have as many Spanish language films as possible!
Watching a movie in another language is an entirely different experience to a Hollywood blockbuster. One has to concentrate and focus undivided attention on the narrative, not only through the words spoken, but also the subtitles. I love immersing myself in a film this way. The subtitles aren’t always accurate, but it’s a good method to improve your vocabulary and find other ways to say a word or phrase. For pronunciation, it’s great, and just listening to the flow of the words can help too. I’ve heard many people state that they learned English through American and English television shows and films, and I’ve often been able to tell which they watched most of from the accent they use!
It’s that time of year again, where we’re all trying to think of fabulous Christmas gifts for family and friends. Don’t worry, I won’t be making these a regular thing all the way through December! I’ve just discovered these magnets which would make a great gift for any language student, and thought I’d share!
These little Magnetic Poetry Kits now come in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian and Swedish, and are a fun way to practice your writing skills in another language. There’s also a Hebrew alphabet kit, a sign language kit, and a Chinese for Kids kit, but these are a little harder to find.
Language journal has published a study by three linguists at the University of Lyon, showing that certain languages are more or less equally efficient.
The study compared the efficiency of conveying information in spoken German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.
Researchers took a sample group of 59 people, who each read a sample text in their native language. The recordings were then edited to remove the pauses, and syllables were tallied in order to draw conclusions regarding the density of information communicated in each language.
Japanese was found to be the fastest spoken language, with 7.84 syllables spoken per second. Mandarin Chinese was the slowest, with the average syllabic speech rate at 5.18. However, the researchers note that in ‘faster’ languages, the individual parts of words are shorter, meaning there are more syllables. They concluded that a higher rate of syllables by no means implies that content can be transmitted more quickly.
A more comprehensive study, carried out by University of Klagenfurt linguistics professor Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon in 2010, reached similar conclusions. In this case, 51 different languages were recorded, with Indian language Tegulu found to be the fastest, and Thai the slowest.
The latest study, in more detailed form, can be found here.
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