Never trust a man with a scarf!

Haha, I love that MM listened. First talk to symphony, "make some room for daddy" and now no scarf. He and I will be friends for a long time.

About correcting people:

So first of all since you asked "médecine" is not the female word for "médecin". "La médecine du travail" is the institution not your particular female doctor.

In general I think it's not easy to keep correcting people all the time. My mother is japanese so obviously I was confronted to the problem.

Most of the time you just want to have a conversation, as long as the meaning is safe why pollute the conversation with "that word is wrong"? Moreover you may just have something more important to say about substance than form.

It is difficult to correct everything, so it is useful to correct mistakes you always do. Maybe they know that you know you made a mistake so there's no need to correct you.

You also get used to hear the mistakes, the accent etc.

Or maybe they are just scared of a ranting Katia :)

@TJ : LMAO. You are not allowed to hang around MM any longer. hehe. Clearly you are a bad influence!

@Daniel : Thanks for the clarification on the médecin vs médecine thing.
You might be right that, after you get to a certain level, people ARE more occupied with substance vs form in a conversation. If someone is relatively fluent, they would rather just talk about the subject than interrupt a conversation a million times with correcting grammar. And maybe they DO know that I know that I'm making mistakes...
And I do get scary when I rant, so maybe that has something to do with it too. hehe. Although I'm very pleased that you think I might say something of substance ;)

Of course you say something of substance, I've actually learn a lot of things in your podcast about france and even about french language.
Of course I have to cross-check Sometimes your substance is not completely true :)

dear K&K,
Thanks for your ever so entertaining podcast ! I have a few comments : First médecine du travail. It's the law, people working in offices have to go to "medecine du travail" every other year, and people in the producing areas have to be checked one a year. The funny part is that in small towns, or in the suburbs of Paris where I work, the medecine du travail appointments are in... a truck ! a special one, with all sorts of useful things : a micro-office for the secretary, an exam room, a place where to get undressed, toilets, etc... It's kinda funny (at least at the beginning).

About being corrected : I'm french, I have sometimes to speak english and I have the same problem : people do not correct the mistakes I make, even if I'm telling them ! So... I think this is universal. People are frightened to hurt you OR they're lazy and they don't care. You may choose which option suits you better (depends on the mood you're in !) Ciao !

I thought you weren't supposed to trust a man with a beard? What if he's wearing a beard, a scarf...AND AN EYE PATCH?

P.S. Color me stupid, ok? I'm a fairly new listener and I have worked my way thru ALL the tourists tips, half of the "Learn French" podcasts and I'm about up to episode 44 and was about to send you an email with my address so I could receive a postcard then it dawned on me that I'm about 2 years too late. Sigh.

okay, i have decided my new year's resolution is to get the waitress to bise me within the next 30 days. she's been tu-ing me for ages AND she knows my name, so i am half way there, right??

as for the medecin du travail, i'm not 100% sure, but i think one of the major reasons the visits were set up was to protect the workers. to give them a 'safe place' to talk if they are having problems at work or are being harassed. or like in your case, to make sure the workers aren't doing anything that could give them work-related or repetitive-motion injuries.

I am always cold too! I could never survive in an 18 degree bedroom. Mine is around 24 and I'm wearing a sweater :( I am really not suited for cold climates.

From what I remember from a course I took:
About the formal and informal, it used to exist in English. "Ye/ You" was the informal version and "thee/ thou" (as in the Bible) was the more formal.
As in Shakespeare the insults were "I bite my thumb at you" (especially insulting because of the informal "you".)
The informal eventually wiped out the formal because people wanted to create more community and less distance between each other.
Which I think is odd considering the personal space issue. It seems to be the inverse of language formality.

Or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Also, Question: I constantly hear you guys saying you're going to have to cut "that" out and I wonder if it ever does get cut out or do we get to listen to the uncut version?

I know the formal/informal pronouns from studying Spanish in school, but good lord I must have offended folks when we attended a wedding (French bride/American groom) this summer in Hasparren. The bride's family/friends were unfailingly gracious and kind to us - even when we must have seemed soooooo American. The only rude person we met in 12 days spent in the Pays Basque, Bordeaux and Paris was a woman selling sandwiches at the beach in Biarritz. But it *was* September - she must have been weary of a summer's worth of tourists.

Love your podcasts!
Sandy