The Bonjour Effect

The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed

De: Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau

Narrado por: Teri Schnaubelt

Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect, Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain, in a book as fizzy as a bottle of the finest French champagne, the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate; they converse.

To understand and speak French well, one must understand that French conversation runs on a set of rules that go to the heart of French culture. Why do the French like talking about "the decline of France"? Why does broaching a subject like money end all discussion? Why do the French become so aroused debating the merits and qualities of their own language?

Through encounters with school principals, city hall civil servants, gas company employees, old friends, and business acquaintances, Julie and Jean-Benoît explain why, culturally and historically, conversation with the French is not about communicating or being nice. It's about being interesting.

©2016 Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau (P)2017 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

"The authors clearly had a ball researching the book, and their glee is infectious. The writing is as light as it is substantive, and if that sounds like a contradiction, I would refer you to a soufflé." ( The New York Times)

Great and informative

An enjoyable must read any non-French who has ties with France. Balanced and engaging storytelling on the French culture. It will make one's future interactions with the French more interesting.

Good book, performance could be better

Good book with a lot of useful information, but narrator pronounces French words with a heavy English accent, hard to understand.

First half good, second half sophomoric

I'm an American who lives in France and speaks French. Even though I've been here a while I found some interesting tips and insights in the first half of the book. I can't understand why they selected a narrator who doesn't speak French very well. Ironic!

The second half of the book is filled with sophomoric insights into French culture that are biased and ill-informed.

Great book, and hello from Paris

This book is quite good and should be updated as it was published in 2017. Would like to hear further updates as things have changed even further since this book was written.

good content, annoying performance

bonjour! as an american in paris, i loved the insights into the french psyche. i’d recommend this as a traditional book, but not as an audiobook. i found the narrator’s tone and delivery overly stuffy. and her french pronunciation was frequently off. c’est dommage as there were so many interesting topics discussed.

Very interesting and informative book

This is a very interesting and informative book. It increases my awareness that all cultures, including my own, have arbitrary and often unspoken rules that dictate how people behave. These arbitrary rules of any given culture probably generate prejudices against cultures whose own arbitrary rules are different than theirs. The narrator did an excellent job when you consider her lack of French fluency. However, I would have rather that a more fluent French speaker had been chosen to narrate.

So Informative

I am such a huge Francophile! Yet I learned so much in this book about the dos and don'ts of french conversation. I would lustrous again but I found the narrator quite annoying with her fake French accent. So I may buy the actual book to re-read.

Worth a Listen for Francophiles

Having an intermediate command of the French language and always having found French culture and history seductive and captivating, this was absolutely my kind of book. It accomplished its purpose by illuminating differences as to how the French do things and perceive the world, with the unique historical and sociological factors at play.

While I understand that Teri Schnaubelt seems to be a big audio-book star, it is beyond comprehension that an author with no command of the French language would have been used for a title like this. Someone else deserved to have performed this. As an example of just how clueless the narrator is, "Le Pen" is pronounced with the nasalized vowel, which indicates a complete and total disconnection between Schnaubelt and anything about French society. She is clearly using a pronunciation guide to help her, but her ineptitude and the lack of editing slip out again with "jacobinisme" pronounced "jay-cohb-in-izmuh"; at times she is using her pronunciation guide, and at times she is winging it.

With a title with such a heavy emphasis on foreign language, it really detracts from the experience and enjoyability wincing and cringing every thirty seconds.

Regarding the content of the book, in spite of its many poignant observations about the French and its utility to any traveler and foreigner, it also grows redundant in the second half and contains a lot of the standard left-wing blather. As an example, in a section on the French Revolution, the leftists are described as supporting individual rights whereas the rightists were all counter-revolutionaries and royalists which is eminently untrue. There were many moderate revolutionaries on the right, and the leftists were the biggest mass murders and lovers of the guillotine under Robespierre, so this portrayal makes perfect since if one considers not life an individual right. Furthermore, the "extreme right" in France is portrayed as this terrible, malodorous societal disease while nothing bad is said of the extreme left.

Enfin, although the first half earns a solid five-out-of-five for content, the second half starts to grow dull. The performance of the narrator is pure cringe and a non-French-speaking person should have never been considered for this position. Also, the book does not get political often but when it does, it is the same pseudo-intellectual babble one would hear in a coffee shop from any struggling liberal arts/psychology major with an Apple laptop. This book is easy to recommend for someone with an interest in French culture but it will not change anyone's life.

Extremely useful

Extremely useful for anyone visiting France. Very helpful for contrasting social conversations that differ between Europe and N America.

Great explanation of the French

This book gave a detailed comparison of French and North American cultures. I highly recommend it for a better understanding of French language and culture.