Wattanasoft, a leading provider of iOS language-learning apps, today is pleased to announce Immersive French for the iPad and iPhone. Immersive French provides the user with a full multimedia learning experience by associating pictures with spoken words and sentences.
Details at prMac.com.
Now I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life… As soon as I get an iPad, that is. Which may now be sooner than I had thought because the Bibliothèque nationale de France has just released Gallica for iPad. And it’s free. The app contains 240,000 books, 880,000 magazines and 470,000 images. Also original musical scores, manuscripts and other goodies. Watch the video, and download the app (French store link).
No iPad? Enjoy the riches on the web.
The bells that have been ringing every 15 minutes since 1856 in the towers of Notre Dame are being melted down and reforged. The Diocese of Paris says they’re ”mediocre in quality and of discordant tonality.”
Not sure I want bells that are in tune. It’s like having perfect teeth; no character…
Read the rest at the Sydney Morning Herald.
An entertainment phenomenon is taking France by storm. Bref. is a hilarious and racy TV series, each episode of which lasts about 1.5 to 2 minutes (as the name implies). The format is a high-speed montage of experiences in the life of the endearingly pathetic protagonist played by Kyan Khojandi.
Bref. depicts the modern daily life of single, late 20- and early 30-somethings in Paris and is full of great slang. A hip and creative professor could come up with some fun activities around this series for advanced — university/adult — language learners.
The show airs weeknights in France during Le Grand Journal (prime time variety show), and if you’re not in France, you can watch them all here. But be warned, most of these videos are probably NSFW. You can follow the show on Twitter too: @BrefSerie.
Be looking for spinoffs in your own country (though I doubt they’ll be nearly as spicy). It’s only a matter of time!
We could wander these virtual stacks for days! So far, the Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitized more than one million works, including books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings, and made them available for free to the public at the Gallica digital library. This is France’s answer to Google Books, and the result of the big fight from a couple of years ago.
The Mullin Automotive Museum, a Southern California institution dedicated to the preservation of French Art Deco era art and automobiles, announced today that its latest book, French Curves: Delahaye ∙ Delage ∙ Talbot-Lago, will be unveiled to the public this August at the 2011 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
We covered the first volume in this series, The Art of Bugatti, here. French Curves is the second volume, and you can buy them both directly from the publisher. If you ask, you can get them signed by author Michael Furman too!
…once upon a time, the ability to speak French properly was considered an absolute essential. In 26 chapters, each focusing on a different colourful Francophile, Fumaroli makes his way across 18th-century Europe. The book is a gallery of Russians, Prussians, Swedes, Poles, Italians and Englishmen; politicians, soldiers, kings and collectors, who all aspired to speak and write the French language beautifully…
Read the rest at The Independent and buy the book at our Amazon store!
France Telecom said today that it was shutting down its ground-breaking Minitel service, the proto-Internet that brought online shopping and chat rooms into millions of French homes in the 1980s.
Read the rest at PCMag.com.
With Mots Interdits, a language-learning game you can print out, you have your students try to get others to guess the word in bold without using any of the words below it. Be sure to check out the other teaching tools this teacher has created and uploaded to this site (look to the right once you click through to Scribd).
A documentary about objectophilia (being in love with objects). The part where the lady marries the Eiffel Tower starts at the 6:50 mark. Dig that ET cleavage tattoo! Watch the video on Documentary Heaven.
Seen @Brainpicker.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the Millau Viaduct that’s down the road from where I live in France.
Read more at Design Observer.
Built by the same firm that renovated the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the Red Star Line Museum will open in Belgium in 2013. All told, the train had transported 2.6 million people through Europe on their way to the United States–Antwerp was typically the last stop before America. Passengers on the line, which ran from 1873 to 1934, included Albert Einstein, Irving Berlin, Golda Meir and Arthur Murray.
Read the rest at Forbes and visit the Red Star Line Museum site.
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