In her blog french-word-a-day.typepad.com, Kristin Espinasse, an American woman who fell in love with the South of France and settled down to raise a family there, teaches readers new words from the French language three times a week. Her lively explanations, full of humor and couleur locale, make learning easy and entertaining.

Many of the words and expressions she chooses are amusing, such as crapulerie (villainy) or potin (gossip). For avoir des oursins dans la poche (to have sea urchins in one’s pocket), Espinasse explains: “From the image of so many ‘stingers’ in the pocket (money that hurts when you touch it!) you get meaning of the expression: that the person is a tightwad!”

To illustrate the language, she uses anecdotes from her daily life. We discover, among other things, a market in Les Arcs and its colorful characters such as the man selling garlicwho “wore a halo of garlic over his head. Shoppers, like me, flocked to the stall, charmed by the man in the garlic gloriole, whose sunny disposition seemed fueled by the alliaceous aura above,” says Espinasse. These instants, along with accompanying photos, immerse you in France’s southland and its way of life.

Conceived five years ago, her blog is both a means to share observations about her adopted country and a “workout room” for her writing. French Word-a-Day also goes out to 17,000 subscribers to her e-newsletter. Browsing the site made us wish there were a comprehensive alphabetical archive of all the words explained since the beginning.

Espinasse arrived in France in 1992, and Aix-en-Provence was the first southern city she experienced. “I fell in love with the bustling outdoor cafés, the warm weather, and the singsong of tourists who shared the sometimes lonely occupation of being a tennis-shoed foreigner in a well-heeled European town,” she recalls.

After spending some time on the French Riviera, she and her family moved to the Rhône Valley and transformed a 400-year-old Provençal farm into a private bio (organic) vineyard. Husband Jean-Marc is the wine blogger in the family, recounting his experiences at www.rouge-bleu.com.

Kristin’s friendly, sensible advice for anyone learning a new language is to go ahead and speak it, even with mistakes: “Risk taking is part of becoming fluent. If we fear that we will make a mistake, we won’t give ourselves the freedom to move forward.”

— Anne Clausse