Well, la Dépêche doesn’t but what would a French newspaper know about French usage, eh 
As they definitely use the article (where they wouldn’t for eg Dordogne) I would use it in English. Like The Lake District or The Peak District, or The Borders but just plain Perthshire 
My heart may be in the highlands but I might just move to Wester Ross…
I’m talking about English usage not French. usage. I’m saying the French definite article should not always be translated verbatim. Eg ‘vive la France’ and ‘Long live France’.
It is available on the computer as well, you don’t need to use a phone for it.
Interesting conversation about using the article or not!
I think I have taught my neighbours Franglish 
Superbe! Je l’aime very much!
Joan Evans
Regarding your question re “any suggestions” I would warmly and wholeheartedly recommend
Michel Thomas learning
French!!!
You can get the lessons for free on YouTube (admittedly with a little searching - I’ve reached lesson 046 so far without paying - which is great!)
Good luck / Bon chance!
Linda
As long as it’s secretly, who gives a monkey’s? C’mon Véro, get your despising out there, if you do!
Secretly, I lust after ‘Josephine Karlsson in 'Engrenages’ but as long as I keep it to myself [pace this admission] Audrey Fleurot won’t be offended.
I hear the idea of getting rid of the circumflex accent is gaining traction. Go for it! Useless article…
There must be a good reason why almost all signwriting on commercial vehicles and premises of NL, DK, N, S, B, and others is in English.
The furniture shop up near Bapaume [60], which had ‘Le Showrooming!’ writ large on its van, must have thought it would enhance sales.
Showing up the gender nonsense to the pinnacle of its pointlessness are the Spanish words pollo and polla
Un pollo is a chicken - a female creature. Una polla is a penis, the principle sexual indicator of a male creature.
A Spanish friend told me that the Spanish would rather I got the uno/una and …o/…a on adjectives right than be stuck in the present tense with verbs.
So, ‘la semana pasada compro un pollo’ is OK? At least I didn’t buy ‘una polla…’
And re Joyce Hartley, I agree. Mixing with the truckers in the HGV bar on the ferries, I found they just got the words out. Their accents were Brum, Jordie, Scouse, Tike, Taffy 'n all but the French staff had no trouble with any of it. Those of us who had years of French at school - 8 in my case - can get rather in a fankle trying to get the pronunciation as we know it should be. I know I do.
UNE bite…! 
Oh, and there are a million and one rules when learning English as a foreign language!
Leaving aside the 80% figure, I’d say substitute French by Latin, because a great deal of the language of the Courts, judicial and ecclesiastical primarily, was Latin.
The word ‘ecclesiastical’ is ‘eclesiastico/a’ in Spanish, ‘ecclésiastique’ in FR and all three come from ‘eclesiasticas’ - Latin.
English got the Latin of France of 1066 rather than the Latin-Spanish of Spain or early 19C French had The Armada or Napoleon’s intended invasion succeeded.
ISTR it’s probably 60% split between French and Latin.
Latin was, of course the, ahem, lingua franca of the clergy and nobility.
As an aside it’s why the plot of “A Knight’s Tale” is such hokum (enjoyable hokum, but hokum) - they would have addressed the hero of the tale in Latin, especially if supposedly from “foreign parts” - his inability to reply would have been a bit of a giveaway.
Hmmm. Not for me.
I got the entire Michel Thomas Spanish course. I gave it up because
a] I did not want to hear Spanish spoken with a pronounced Mittel European accent - Michel Thomas’s provenence is unclear [I have read his biography] but he is probably from somewhere now in Poland and sounds it.
b] The format of the lessons are, in the Spanish version, addressed to two students. They answer questions or repeat phrases, as instructed by him. One of the students of the Spanish was so impenitrably dim and so linguistically incompetent the lessons frequently ground to a halt for minutes on end while Thomas tried to get this person to utter a reasonable approximation of, for example, the word ‘muy’.
I saw an unlikely claim that he had taught Emma Thomson to speak Spanish over a weekend to the point where she did not need her co-star, Antonio Banderas, to translate either way, at a movie press launch.
Old Norse. A lot of it about in the border counties of England and in Scotland. If you drive from Richmond, Yorkshire to Kendal, Cumbria, you are passing through Norse country - Askrigg, Muker, Garsdale, Hardraw, Gunnerside, Redmire. The village of Sedbergh means ‘flat topped hill’ in Norse.
On the road in the countryside one day, with a Danish pal, I asked him what the Danish for a fence post is.
Answer - ‘hegn stolpe’. Apart from the word ‘hegn’ looking like ‘hedge’, ‘stolpe’ sounded like ‘stoobe’. On the Tweed valley farm of a friend I was often roped in to replace ‘stobs’ - fence posts. I had a feeling that the words would be of a kind.
My grandmother used to stride about the beach in St Andrews declaiming in ON and OE - such wonderful words for things, I found seamews, agenbite of inwit and tungolwitega etc completely bewitching Scots has plenty of ON and Dutch admixture, a friend of mine speaks Shetlandic as do her family and that is fascinating too.
Edited to remove a superfluous comma.
I spent a year in Denmark and spoke it quite well at the end (was only 18 and in school!). Not long before I left I heard my host mother watching TV and thought it was something Scottish as from the next room it sounded to me like it was. I went in to watch and discovered that it was in fact a documentary about the west coast (of Denmark) fishermen. Presumably those same vikings that popped across the sea on raids many years before!!! 
Those sneaky commas - they get in all over where they shouldn’ae.
A pal was being interviewed on TV [NYC. USA] about his recently-published novel: a very weighty tome. He was asked if there was anything he’d like to change. He replied that he would like to eliminate about 10,000 semi-colons.
My brief visits to DK haven’t got me nearly that far but if I squint hard and dredge up my rudimentary German, I can just about get the gist of a newspaper.
I’ve always maintained that the Danish and Dutch are what the English would be like if only we behaved better.
Perhaps the nice Danes stayed at home and only the unpleasant war-like ones came to Britain?
Just so. Look what they did at Lindisfarne.
What with the Anglo-Saxons, who buried their dead, men, women and boys, with a sword - an ‘active service’ model, not a ceremonial - the Vikings and the Normans, who had been Vikings recently, and the Scots, the Britis are a warrior race.
My mother used to be the sister in charge of Catterick Camp Family Health Centre. On the other side of the road was a chip shop and the cinema. The Monday morning clinic was mostly casualties from the weekend’s dust-ups outside the chippie. It was always worse when The East Lancs were stationed at Catterick - a principal recruiting source of that regiment being Glasgow.
I found this a great inroduction. I borrowed it from my local library. The only problem is the American lady - one of the students. Anyone who has listened to the course will know what(who) I’m referring to.
Well, if you are going to be picky … “with whom I disagreed” 
