"Hello French", the Instagram account to learn informal French

Audio 01:13

On Instagram, the account Hello French (@hellofrenchnyc) quickly became essential. Cécilia Jourdan, a Parisian living in New York, gives her method for learning informal French. © Instahram screenshot @hellofrenchnyc

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1 min

With more than a million followers on Instagram, the Hello French account has become in a few months a must on social networks, especially abroad, to learn French. And not just any. Cecilia Jourdan, a Parisian living in New York, leaves grammar summaries in the closet and prefers expressions of everyday life.

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In the videos of the @hellofrenchnyc account on Instagram, the dialect is a mixture of English and French practiced by a thirty-year-old with brown hair and sparkling eyes. For Cécilia Jourdan, it all started three years ago, during the lockdown, in the United States.

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I've been an "expat" for 15 years now, she tells us. I had this desire to create Hello French to promote French, the French language, culture...

Cécilia Jourdan is amused by the revealing expressions, according to her, of our attitudes of grumbling or deeply romantic French. Clichés she likes to play with. For example, she embodies a particularly unpleasant Parisian by highlighting, of course, the vocabulary that is hers.

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A post shared by Cecilia | Hello French (@hellofrenchnyc)

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Spoken French is not written French. Molière's language is very beautiful, but in reality, spoken French is not formal French," she explains.

The Frenchwoman based across the Atlantic has more than a million subscribers, which is necessarily more than the Académie française... who does not have an Instagram account. A proof perhaps of the success of his method, which gives a little more space to big words than to grammar.

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Read on on the same topics:

• France
• United States
• Francophonie
• Social Media
• Culture