Now that is a whole other can of worms - there are many past tenses in English and in French and they aren’t necessarily equivalent. So many English speakers blithely say ‘the past tense’ as if there were only one.
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Past anterior!
I’ve been reading Guy de Maupassant’s short stories and a longer novel and they are SO easy to read, and SO evocative of French life that I find them enchanting, absolute page-turners IMO.
They do include a fair amount of idiomatic spoken French conversation, very reassuringly ‘ungrammatical’ and colourful, even if slightly dated. But very real-life and to-the-point. Lots of the stories of rural hardship are vividly re-imagined today.
They can be bought on-line in basic paperback form for less than €5 and I strongly recommend them to anyone learning to speak French, or to immerse oneself in French literary culture.
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This intriguing thread led me to my treasured copy of Alexander Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments (the Bible student’s Bible of Quotations)…
…to look up kiss/kisses/kissed (Cruden catalogued every word in the King James Version in alphabetical order).
kiss 8 mentions
kisses 12 mentions
kisses 28 mentions
kissing 0 mention
Roughly 75% OT, 25% NT sources.
Roughly 85% kisses male initiated of which about 90% to other men.
Roughly 15% kisses female initiated, about half to other women half to men.
Kisses mainly not categorised as to target anatomy of recipient, of those where the destination was stated hands, necks and lips got a mention. Necks were sometimes fallen upon with kisses (man to man).
No instances found of kissing being prohibited or frowned upon although I didn’t go to every chapter and verse cited by Cruden.
Cruden was/is still regarded as a mad genius, and TMK nobody has ever improved on his crazy scholarship. 
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Maybe that can be a SF thing: greet each other with a holy kiss.
I found these two videos on YT, which sort of relate to the original topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1R5QR1onU4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8
Oh Stevie I just watched one of the videos and it was amazing, I understood almost everything the presenter said! What is this YT thingie? Is it a TV channel or what?
Please can you provide more details or signposting? TIA
Hi Peter
I have to stop myself being a bore on the topic because it’s something which fascinates me 
YouTube has loads of material in French. A lot of it is subtitled and you can slow it down if the pace is too fast. I have nigh on 200 channels to which I subscribe. Often YouTube will make a suggestion for something else to watch.
From my recent history I see I have watched
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8cSQtoMw8 flirting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSrjzk0WJ6A wine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKPoS7J8_Y surprising things about America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wZrqkVkwU0 some sort of film?
My belief is that one way of learning efficiently - once one has attained a certain level - is by watching stuff which interests us. It’s really what Gabe was saying, I think.
Hope these are at least interesting!
Hummm, thanks - like Peter I really enjoyed the 1st one as I pretty much understood all of it - looking at a brief section with subtitles enabled I see that I missed a few words but M Cotton has a really clear voice that I found easy to follow - it would be interesting to see if he speaks slightly on the slow side (native speakers usually rattle on at 150-200 words per minute, 2nd language speakers usually are more comfortable at 100-150 wpm) .
The TED talk made a lot of sense but it is not always straightforward to immerse yourself in a language when you are in another country most of the time.
I’ll certainly be seeking more of Hugo Cotton’s stuff on YT or at https://innerfrench.com/
I’m still not thinking quite like a native - I can “feel” myself processing what is being said in English as well as things like spotting the change in sound as an adjective agrees with a feminine - and literally thinking “oh, that’s because xx is feminine” but it was quite nice to listen to 12 minutes of French and think “hey I understand this”.
The other thing that I’d like to know from a French speaker (hello @vero) is whether the choice of vocab was 100% “native” - I thought that there were quite a few Anglicisms and “bons amis” in there.
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I think he is speaking slowly and clearly and using vocabulary selected for comprehension by English-speakers - and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think anyone aware of the difficulties of second language acquisition is going to do the same thing; the difficulty for people like you who move here to the sticks is deciphering your garrulous neighbour pépé Marcel’s dialect when he hasn’t got his teeth in.
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Agree that there is nothing wrong with that – in fact it’s about right for my current level of French - hence my enthusiasm for listening to some of his other material for practice.
I haven’t moved so perhaps it is even more difficult - I have previously mentioned that I wonder whether trying to understand (some of) some of my neighbours is akin to a Frenchman moving to Wales and trying to learn English.
Oh, I doubt you meant it that way but the phrase “people like you” makes me feel uncomfortable - as though I have been marked out as undesirable for some reason.
Precisely Véronique! I can read novels in French and enjoy the French talk radio station ‘Culture’ - but only because its generally full of posh Parisiens (I’m absolutely at that ‘Macron’ stage in the excellent video Stevie recommended) - but put me in front of the average French teenager and I’m quickly lost…
But the biggest problem for me now is that my hearing, especially when there is ambient noise as in many social situations, is just not up to anything but the very clearest speech. My kids keep telling me to go and get it tested - but when I compare notes with others my age we all seem to have the same problem.
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Oh sorry, no ‘people like you’ just means in a very general way anyone who moves to another country where they may have a sophisticated grasp of the language/ some notions of the language/ practically none and find themselves talking to real people who haven’t a clue about 2nd language acquisition/ don’t speak the standard version of the language/ can’t imagine not speaking the language/ conflate lack of language with lack of nous.
I hope that is clearer.
If it is any consolation sweeping generalisations about ‘the French’ often make me feel uncomfortable because you know, that’s me the generalisation is about 
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Do I recall you saying you had a house in Brittany Paul? If so, of course, like me you have the additional problem of Breton (which is indeed very similar to Welsh!). Although everyone where I am speaks French habitually, for 2 of my nearest neighbours it is their second language too!
Yes, hence my comment about a Frenchman trying to learn English in Wales!
To be fair put me in front of an average English teenager and I have some difficulties 
Absolutely - it’s just that, in English, the phrase “people like you” seems to increasingly be a prelude to a less than positive comment about some (often half imagined) group of people of which the subject is supposed to belong.
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I should have said ‘people in your situation’ but again that has a faint whiff of the situation being unfortunate in some way. I suppose any sort of imprecision sounds a bit euphemistic so we immediately think the worst.
I think it underlines something we have touched on before - language can be very subtle with a very slight turn of phrase capable of changing the tone completely - and the more accomplished we get the more likely we are to fall foul of those subtleties because the listener stops assuming that it is a mistake or misunderstanding and starts to assume the speaker used that phraseology deliberately.
There is an interesting parallel in how well people react to humanoid robots - acceptability rises with increasing realism but then dips, the so-called uncanny valley where the response can dip all the way to revulsion. There are many suggested mechanisms (see the Wikipedia article) but I think it is a lot to do with getting small behavioural cues wrong (or not responding to those cues in others).
As my memory is lousy I use daily ’ 5000 most frequently used French words — with images’
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/893324022
to increase my word-bank. 