2007-12-15 Interesting, useful and funny

I'm not a French speaker or learner myself, but bought this as a gift for a friend who is tackling the language. I'm sure they'll enjoy it as it's quite fun compared to the dry language texts I had to wade through at school. It's interesting to see that some French idioms are quite similar to ours but have an unusual slant. For example, where we have 'Pushing up the daisies', they have 'Eating the daisies from the roots up'; we write 'Rubber cheques', and they write 'wooden' ones (like taking a 'wooden nickel'?). Others are quite surreal 'Falling backwards into apples' sound quite painful, but to the French this is a soft landing. Although it's amusing, the text is scholarly enough to be useful to the serious student and the cartoons are excellent. You can't argue with the price either: great value.