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Love your videos! So helpful! Btw, love your red 💄 lipstick. Please share brand and color name ;) ❤

Love love love your videos! And your soft voice is so easy to listen to AND your love for France exudes from your soul ❤

I absolutely share your opinion that properly using a foreign language in all aspects of life requires many years of intensive involvement and especially a cultural immersion. On YT I listen to many people claiming to have acquired proficiency in one ( or even several) foreign language(s) within one year, and I feel stupid myself. You Madame however , have told a story that was much more similar to my own experience. I am grateful, thank you.

Merci madame Bussen

Bonjour Karen! I’m just finding you as I begin my journey to revive and expand my French (4yrs instruction in high school many years ago). I’ve always used “Je voudrais” instead of “Je veux” as an assumed more polite way of asking for something. Recently, my mother in law, who has lived in Paris the last decade or so, indicated that “Je besoin” is what’s used in Paris. Can you comment on that? Was your example of “Je vais prendre” focused more on the “s’il vous plait” at the end? Merci!

Great thank you

I would be interested in how you learned your French. Thanks Nicole

Fascinating

Et l'armagnac ... Pas mal aussi ...☝️😁

Essayez le floc de gascogne ...😋😋😋

Ça a l'air bon !! 😁😁😋😋😋

On voit que le niveau de l'eau est bas ... Heureusement que les pluies aideront à faire remonter le niveau ...🤔🤔

Il faut énormément de courage (ou d'amour ? Ou d'inconscience ?😂😂...) pour faire ce que vous avez fait !! .... Tout quitter, et apparemment une situation plutôt confortable à new york ... Pour plonger dans l'inconnu, avec, un inconnu !!😳😨😨😂😂 ...

Amusant ... J'habite près de fontainebleau ... Un château que je recommande de visiter est celui de vaux le vicomte, près de melun, donc de fontainebleau ....prenez le temps de visiter les jardins ... Et mettez des chaussures de marche confortables , car ces jardins sont très grands !! 😁😁👍

Faites une recherche ADN ... Vous avez certainement quelques racines françaises ... Ou alors vous l'avez été dans une vie antérieure ...😂😂😂

Oui ... En amerique on ne s'installe pas comme on veut dans un restaurant ... On vous place ... C'est surprenant ... Et ils attendent que vous partiez rapidement pour pouvoir rentabiliser le plus possible la table !! 😱😱😂😂

your skin is perfect!!! What french skincare do you use?? great video!

Et une bonne raclette aussi !! 😁😁😋😋😋😋👌

😁😁😋😋😋😋👍👍

J'aime beaucoup votre manière d'aborder les choses .... J'espère que vous vous acclimaterez bien et que vous pourrez être heureuse dans ce pays ... C'est sûr qu'il n'est pas facile de sortir de sa zone de confort et de se confronter à une culture et des coutumes totalement étrangères !! 🤔🤔

Oui ... Le permis de conduire ... Ce n'est pas quelque chose de simple ...😨😂😂

Thanks for this it would be very helpful if you popped up little cards on the screen ever time you say something in French. For those of us that don't speak French, I have to little idea how to spell things based on how they're pronounced. Cheers

Bonjour , How much do these ecoles charge and how long is the process , thanks

All those points just require doing your homework before you move to another country .there are no surprises its information you can find anywhere before you move.

driving schools use their success rate as a mean of promotion so they will make sure you have the best chance of not failing; and make money in the process. Also Getting your license in a city and a rural place is not the same; easier in a rural place; and also city means a lot of time spent stuck in trafic so longer lessons needed. It is indeed a pretty shady business.

Can I move to France if I have over $$$,$$$.$$ in savings to live off while I find a job in France?

Very nice video

As a Frenchman, I offer you all my sympathy for your terrible discovery of French administration. An English friend of mine once joked with me: “I've believed in the existence of the devil ever since I discovered French administration”. And yet, in this “hell”, there are oases of humanity: when you click (when it's possible) on the “to be called back by an advisor” tab, you often come into contact with very friendly, empathetic advisors, who will help you sort out your file... provided you speak French. I hope you don't have to discover a 7th “thing”: “having to settle a legal dispute” a dispute involving French law and the law of the country you come from. Kafkaesque! Enjoy your stay in our country! As soon as you leave the administration, there's a lot to discover! I enjoyed your presentation. It helps me to maintain my English!

Thank you

How do the general population treat senior citizens?

Regarding the bank account for Americans: I moved to Paris for a couple of years in 1972. I took a cashier's check from my American bank and had a bank account established within an hour or so. No problem at all. Also, to me it seems that some of that information should have come from your husband, who you said is French.

Le problème des langues... Il y a un pays, que je connais, ou c'est épique Au Japon! Avoir une tête d'européen fait de vous un américain. Parler quelques mots de japonais les ravis. Même si leur anglais est "spécial", beaucoup d'entre eux refuseront d'essayer de le parler. Et il arrive aussi que des occidentaux parlant le japonais ne soient pas compris de certains d'entres eux. Il y a un blocage cérébrale qui s'il était inconcevable qu'un européen puisse parler japonais. S'il y a un asiatique dans un groupe et qu'il ne parle pas japonais. Ils pourraient ne parler qu'à l'asiatique en japonais même s'il ne le parle pas et que c'est un occidental du groupe qui le parle. Et quand vous dites que vous êtes français, les gens sont ravis et vous parle de Napoléon, Louis XIV et de la mode. Les français et les japonais partagent un amour mutuel pour leurs cultures réciproques.

Excellent video.

Il n'y a que deux façons de parler couramment le français : vivre en France ou rester à la maison et trouver une petite amie française. i have spent 20 years studying french and i am that person you were. i am proud of what i know but i know i will never be totally fluent.

Thank you, Karen, for your helpful video. Mostly appreciated 🙏 My husband and I are retiring at the beginning of 2025 and planning to move to France sometime in September, where we have some family and friends. We'll then start gathering the paperwork and apply for the VLS-TS. Any advice on which health insurance would be a great choice to purchase price wise and affordable?

Really enjoyed this, Karen! You’ve nailed some of the biggest surprises about moving to France - the bank account and driver’s license process can be such a headache. It’s great to hear how you’re navigating it all with flexibility and patience. As someone who works with expats, I know these tips will help a lot of people. Keep sharing your journey, it’s so relatable!

I've been telling people that at my age, learning French is like trying to push a cucumber into a brick. An awful lot of the cucumber ends up on the floor.

What a nice video. I was struck at the end when you talking about accent. My French is still pretty terrible, but as I am kind of a myna bird, my accent is FANTASTIC! So I enter a shop or something with a polished sentence set up and ready to go, do so in my superb accent, and of course then the recipient hammers away in hyper French that I cannot understand more than 10% of. Then we both laugh when I explain, "c'est tout" that was it!

Thank you for sharing your experience!

Scissors, pliers, pants -- English also has "false" plurals.

Typically American ignorance

Money = argent = silver ! Too easy...

43 here, married to a French person too, and been in France since 2020 (yeah, that year was hard, lol). It's not my first time living abroad, actually me and my spouse met and got married in a 3rd country, so we learned to really rely on each other because we had no support system there. While in the 3rd country, we were expats, and yes we did tend to run in expat groups, but it wasn't fulfilling at all, because of the transient nature of expats, everyone wants to make friends as quickly as possible, but no one wanted lasting friendships, it's also why it was extremely rare for the locals to want to be friends with expats because they knew you would leave, I was able to make some lasting friendships from that experience, but none of them are here in France. Fortunately my spouse has a really good friend group here in France and they accepted me with open arms, and they are ok that my French is coming very slowly, though they do forget I'm still learning and talk really fast and only use English if they think I'm not getting it at all. But it's not the same as having friends that have had similar experiences to you, it can be very lonely sometimes when the only people you know are people from that country, they laugh at jokes you don't get because you don't know the cultural references (sometimes they explain them, sometimes they say it's complicated and never explain), they were raised in a different culture so sometimes they don't understand your perspective, things like that, and since Ile-de-France is a very big region, sometimes we only see people in this friend group 3-4 times a year because they have their own lives and families and responsibilities, and no one is in my town or close enough where we can visit whenever, every thing has to be planned sometimes months in advance (which reminds me I have to remind my Frenchies about us hosting Thanksgiving soon, lol). But I've also been super hesitant to make friends within the immigrant (from Anglophone countries) community and/or expat community here, maybe I'm biased or have a prejudice or something, or bad memories of trying really hard to make real friends in those groups in the other country I lived in and them all mostly being superficial. Like I do want to be considered an immigrant that actually tried to integrate and not the kind that only associated with people from my home country or only speak my native language (there are immigrants/expats in many countries that are like this, English speakers in France are sometimes no different), I met those in that 3rd country who had been there for FIFTEEN years and never really learned the native language well and only associated with people that spoke their native language, and I know there are groups like that here too. But it's also hard because I do miss being able to speak in English without having to repeat myself constantly and understand certain things about the culture I grew up in without having to explain myself, like I don't want to lose the good things about my culture, I want to integrate but I DON'T want to assimilate

Lovely video, full of great ideas. I wish I'd had this kind of direction when I moved to London for a year in my early 20s. I'm in shock that you're in your 50s, as you look to be mid-30s! Your hutzpah in moving to a new country, becoming fluent in French, and also getting married now, is pure inspiration. Loving this channel; please do more! Merci! 😊

So happy to see you back on RUclips. :-) Very interesting topic and useful tips, as always. You are a true inspiration. Big hugs from Hungary! :-)

I am French and have lived in Missouri and in Texas and I had to take the driving licence exam again (theory and driving tests).

This is a brilliantly stark, honest, but inspiring representation of the true struggles of language learning (but also how one can overcome those struggles). It was incredibly validating to hear that someone else had had the same experience as me with the "oh you speak x language, when we're in x country you'll be able to sort everything". I'd been learning French academically for maybe 4 years, so my writing and reading were at a decent level, as was my understanding of basic grammar (tenses, agreements etc.). Yet, similar to you, I couldn't complete a task as basic as ordering in a café, or finding a bus! My listening comprehension was ok with pre recorded clips, pronounced slowly and clearly, specifically made for language learners - but when it was native speakers talking in an everyday situation, I was completely and utterly lost. I also couldn't speak for the life of me; forming sentences on the fly was difficult and terrifying. This of course seems crazy to a non language learner who might think "well if you've learnt French for 4 years, why can't you speak it?" Well I'm glad to say that, although I'm still learning, I've finally started to notice the progress from immersing myself in the country (moving to France to study abroad) and constantly listening to the language. A lot of it is about mindset. Some people will say that mindset is a "wishy washy" topic, but in fact I think it would be a terrible idea for anyone to ignore it. When you remind yourself of the small wins you are having daily, that intrinsically motivates you to continue. Language learning is a brutal thing. Really, it's unfair how difficult it is. For so long, there can be so little reward for so much effort (especially if your mindset is wrong). It's incredibly likely that someone could learn 1000-2000 words in a language and still not be able to speak it - and learning that many words isn't quick and easy. They could also learn every tense inside out and still not understand a single word when listening; native speakers are just simply too quick for them to understand. If this was a video game, nobody would want to play it, because why waste 100s of hours for seemingly no reward? You're also probably not even getting paid for that time. But the fact that language learning is so objectively and undeniably unfair, is one of the things I find most profoundly rewarding. It's unfairly difficult, yes, but when those breakthroughs do start to come - well there isn't a feeling like it on earth. To be able to connect with other people in a different country, and understand another culture on a deep and intrinsic level is one of the gifts of the human experience. That's what makes me love language learning.

Merci I parce que vous … I just committed to a on line Session with my long ago French teacher 💋💋

Sorry but the French government no longer allows people to come to France except beautiful women

yes I am researching and looking into living in South of France but I need to visit different areas. Do you have a realtor that can help me find a place Rental not to purchase. Glad I found your you tube channel.