Mentioned in the audio : https://www.helloasso.com/associations/haut-parleuses

Sponsor https://www.editions-ellipses.fr/accueil/14485-cerveau-et-emotions-a-l-adolescence-les-neurosciences-au-service-des-competences-sociales-et-emotionnelles-dans-l-enseignement-9782340072930.html

Transcript: Hi, I’m Hannah and welcome back to Don’t Say It, a podcast designed to help you master the finer details of the English language. Today’s subject is probably a common error you have all made at some time – confusing assister with assist. We’ll share our pain of faux amis together, let’s laugh at me first and then I’ll teach you some easy synonyms to use instead. I’m a teacher by trade, and as you may well know i spend one quarter of my time in the class room, another quarter preparing lessons and the other half of the time ? in meetings of course ! Les fameuses reunions ! When I started teaching in France in 2008, I made my first faux pas. (Incidently, I need to research if it means faux pas, as in false step, or faut pas as it you shouldn’t do it. Anyway...) So, my first faux pas was not showing up to meetings. I was consistently absent. I will be honest, I was starting to feel left out. But I never seemed to be at the right place at the right time. You see everytime there was a meeting someone would ask me ‘Voulez vous assiter à la reunion?’ And I would reply, ‘oh nono, je ne me sens pas du tout préte d’assister.’ You already know the mistake I made. I confused assister with aider. To be present at the meeting, with help conduct the meeting ! Not the same thing ! I find that a lot of these faux amis words come from a common base principle, and then branch of a couple hundred years ago into a French meaning and an English meaning . assister is similar. The original latin meaning was to be present. To stand by. I think that is quite beautiful, because it is true that the English meaning does still apply. To assist someone is to be present for them. The detail, is in the intention. Assister à la réunion is to be simply present. Assist during a meeting, is to help others. In other contexts, assiter does involve helping others, which is why i find this expression such a trap! I really did think I was going to find an immediate link with assister and assise, meaning sitting down. Anywho... So, Hannah, I hear you plead, how to we translate it to English? Let me give you an example. This weekend I attended a festival in Rennes. I’ll put a link in the description. It was called the haut parleuses festival and I attended to learn about podcasting and to meet other women creating their own companies and their own podcasts. I’m really happy I attended, because I made some great contacts and got some great information. Did you hear the word? To attend a meeting. Then what is assist? Well, you can infer the meaning and you will probably be right. Oh my god, I just remembered Coolio, y’all. What are we even doing here if we are not talking about Coolio, guys? He died this week, even though paramedics assisted him for 45 minutes, trying to resuccitate him back to life. When Coolio’s song first came out, I was 15 and even I was sure I was living in a gansta’s paradise, dude. He made us feel the feelings ! So a lot of people say that music assists them in recovery from illness, from addiction, it can assist you to get out of depression. It helps. Let’s just note some stas there ; three weeks on the hot 100 chart, boy, grammy, and one billion views on Youtube, damn. So I hope that helped. We translate assister à la reunion to attend, and assist in English is aider, to help or to support someone. Follw my instagram, KORU traducitons, check out my website and remember to make mistakes cause they make for good stories and they help us learn. Bye!