french vocab from the first half of my year abroad

scottish-polyglot:

I’m home for Christmas now, which means I’m back on Scottish soil with decent internet. It’s giving me a chance to reflect on my French and how much it has improved just in three months of living in France. So I thought I’d share some of the things that I learned from living in the Charente-Maritime: 

ah, bah, oui (expression)
this seems to be the equivalent of ‘yeah but no’ when people have a false-start on a sentence. usually, i heard this in disagreements in my classroom when students were wanting to correct another student but couldn’t get the words out fast enough. i think it’s a hilarious thing to say and i’ve been trying to incorporate it into my way of speaking. 

en fait (expression)
this literally means ‘in fact’ or ‘actually’, which i think can come off a little rude in english but is actually a common expression in french. french people i have encountered use ‘en fait’ to start sentences, to provide more information, to correct, basically just all the time! 

franchement (adverb)
in english, i’m a big fan of using ‘tbh’ or ‘to be honest’, and this is the best french equivalent to that. it sounds so very french when it’s said and can mean ‘frankly’, ‘honestly’, ‘indisputably’ or ‘without hesitation’, depending on the context. 

rater (verb)
i picked up this new verb when i was telling a class about how i failed my driving test. i knew that ‘rater’ can mean ‘to miss’, as in ‘i missed the train’, but one student turned to another and said that ‘elle a raté’ and it was explained to me that ‘rater’ can also mean ‘to fail’, or in my case ‘to mess up’ something. 

se tromper (verb)
this verb means ‘to be mistaken’, and i definitely found myself saying ‘je me suis trompée’ a lot while I was just new to the country! 

une chocolatine (noun)
I was living on the south-west coast of France in the Charente-Maritime region which means that I picked up some new and different ways of saying things. I was quickly informed by my students in the most sincere and serious way possible that the famous ‘pain au chocolat’ pastry does not exist in the Charente-Maritime and I was to ask for ‘une chocolatine’ at the local boulangerie instead. I now use both nouns interchangeably!