I downloaded the Collins Easylearning French Idioms eBook (also available in print); I love how idioms are so much more than a linguistic feature; they tell stories and represent the country from which they originate. Here are my top ten French idioms from the book, in no particular order – I’m looking forward to trying a few of them out when I head to France over the summer for the second part of my year abroad.

Becoming fluent on your year abroad is easy as pie if you're constantly surrounded by local people at work, at university and in your social life, but in reality your 'year' abroad might be only seven months (or half of it spent in another country), you might also hang out with English-speaking friends while you're there, and of course you always need a bit of time to yourself! There's no way that you can be fully-immersed 24/7, but you still need to appear less foreign/touristy as fast as possible. Why? So that locals don't reply to you in English, so they trust you and open up to you more, and so that you feel you are progressing quickly which helps hugely with confidence. "Your [insert language] is amazing! How long have you been here for?!" We are all, secretly, praise junkies.

More than 130 million people speak French as their native language, and most of those are based in France. When travelling (and living) in France, you should also bear in mind that it is rich in minority languages and dialects as well. During the French Revolution, the French language was favoured over the different regional languages. The revolutionaries thought that the monarchists preferred regional languages because they “kept the masses uninformed”. Regional languages started to be referred to as patois, a derogative term in its beginnings. Sometimes patois refers to non-Parisian French as well as regional languages. An example of standard, Parisian French is spoken by TV news anchors.