bonjour les tous
trying out franglais - please corect
I need your advice
J’ai besoin de votre (avis?)
I live in Amboise
j’habite a Amboise (can’t do accents on Qwerty)
je suis anglaise
my son is visiting for the first time since Brexit.
mon fils visite le premier fois depuis Brexit
il voyage par ‘coach’ de
Wales to London
de pays de Galles a Londres
London to Paris
de Londres a Paris
Paris to Tours - Indre et Loire
de Paris a Tours
He has a current passport
Il a un passeporte
Does he need a Visa
il a besoin de Visa?
I need vitamins from Boots Chemist
j’ai besoin de vitamines de Boots
OK for him to bring over?
c’est OK?
thanks for help
merci a vous
Hi Pamela,
Good of you to post in both languages, but generally SF is an English-speaking zone (though we do indulge in some Franglais occasionally!)
If your son is a UK citizen and coming just for a private visit then he just needs a passport, no visa needed, and can then stay for 90 days in any 180.
After mid 2025 he will need to get an ETIAS visa waiver, but I assume he’s coming before that!
(Also ETIAS keeps getting postponed…)
Standard over the counter vitamins should be fine, in “personal use” quantities - prescription drugs I believe you should not bring in more than 3 months supply, or sufficient for the duration of the prescription (e.g. a two week course of antibiotics).
There are some drugs that may arouse questions if you happen to get checked, e.g.:
ADHD/ADD medications (*Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin) *considered illegal narcotics in many European countries.
Pain medications (Vicodin, Oxycontin, Demerol)
Anxiety medications (Xanax, Ativan, Valium)
If he needs any of those he should bring a copy of his doctor’s prescription.
Install Lexibar it’s very easy to use.
Do I understand correctly, you want confirmation that the French phrases are correct?
thank you b33jay
will get on to this
bw
Pamela
pamela-shields.com
Hi Pamela
I think there’s guidance on the UK govt site… about visiting family in France… ???
hope it all goes smoothly… 
I honestly wouldn’t worry about any of that. In theory french immigration could ask for any or all of that list but in reality he will just need to show his (valid) passport and get an entry stamp.
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thank you Stella
(me too!!)
@ChrisMann has answered your questions about medicines and visas, so I won’t repeat that.
Instead let’s have a bash at your franglais. This is just my interpretation though, and I’m not a native speaker… I may well make mistakes myself.
bonjour les tous
Bonjour à toutes et à tous (use à for “to”, toutes means all the females and tous means all the males)
trying out franglais - please corect
“correct” 
I need your advice
J’ai besoin de votre (avis?)
Personally I’d use conseil instead of avis. Avis for me is for asking for someone’s opinion. Slight nuance perhaps but distinguishable nonetheless imo.
I live in Amboise
j’habite a Amboise (can’t do accents on Qwerty)
je suis anglaise
Rien à signaler 
my son is visiting for the first time since Brexit.
mon fils visite le premier fois depuis Brexit
I’d change this slightly to say your son is visiting you for the first time since Brexit by using the horribly named (but simple to use!) pronominal verb - which is just a fancy way of saying it relates to a pronoun Simply say “me visite” to say “visiting me”.
However I’d also use the future tense instead of the present tense… There’s a really easy way to cheat if you’re not sure of how to conjugate verbs in the future tense - just learn the future tense of the verb être (je vais, tu vas, il va, etc…) and stick that in front of the infinitive of the verb you would otherwise need to conjugate. So, for example, for “visiter”, just say “je vais visiter…”, “tu vas visiter…”, “il va visiter…”, etc…
Or using the pronominal version of your earlier phrase, “mon fils va me visiter pour la première fois depuis Brexit”
il voyage par ‘coach’ de
Wales to London
de pays de Galles a Londres
London to Paris
de Londres a Paris
Paris to Tours - Indre et Loire
de Paris a Tours
Replace coach by bus (yes, I know it’s not the same in English… It’s a faux ami). Personally I’d probably have used the verb prendre (to take), just to mix it up a bit as you previously used voyager. And maybe add a couple of filler words like après or ensuite, just to break up the journey steps.
Using the ‘lazy’ future tense hack I mentioned earlier, it becomes “il va prendre le bus du pays de Galles à Londres, après il va prendre le bus de Londres à Paris, et ensuite de Paris à Tours”
He has a current passport
Il a un passeporte
Does he need a Visa
il a besoin de Visa?
Not much to change here apart from passport is feminine so it’s “une passeport”. And you should say “besoin d’un visa” not just “de visa”.
I need vitamins from Boots Chemist
j’ai besoin de vitamines de Boots
OK for him to bring over?
c’est OK?
To me this doesn’t really work as a literal word-for-word translation because Boots isn’t a known brand in France. I guess you could add “de la pharmacie Boots” to clarify what you mean.
“C’est ok?” on its own sounds really clunky. I think I would add more context to your question. Keeping it in the franglais sense, maybe something like “C’est possible pour lui de le faire?” (pour lui meaning “for him”, and de le faire meaning “to do it”). That’s cheating a little bit cause it’s changing slightly what you said in English, but it’s a nice little phrase to convey the meaning and something you can maybe reuse in other situations too.
If you wanted to step outside your comfort zone a bit, I’d say something along the lines of “Est-ce qu’il a le droit de les amener en France?”
thanks for help
merci a vous
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Reading all that back now I realise I’ve perhaps gone a bit OTT. Apologies about that. I can honestly say that if you say what you had put, everybody would have absolutely understood you 100%.
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Aller, surely?
Haha, indeed 
Well spotted, Brian
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Mon fils me rend visite. We don’t really say visiter, we say rendre visite.
No it’s un passeport
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Good to know. Thanks for clarifying
Ah, merci 
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When I was little at French primary school we had to memorise lots of lists, times tables still useful as are noun suffixes/spellings to indicate gender
A good article here
And handy pin-up tables
(Still remember having my knuckles rapped with a ruler for making mistakes. 
)
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My kids had the same, tables, tables and more tables but it did them good in the end. I still have many of their french school pieces, all their reports right from primaire to Uni.
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I loved the article in L’Independent for this area today about the gendarmes catching “un go-faster” on the A9 yesterday. Some high powered sports car thought he would chance his luck, not so lucky now!
I’d have done mon fils vient de l’Angleterre pour me voir. Visiter tends to mean a physical examination or an inspection.
besoin de vos conseils rather than avis.
I’d avoid Boots name completely can always show the receipt if he has to. Vitamins are available online now even in Amazon and in supermarkets so I might mention which vitamins or vitamines mixtes/courants (= normally found) and not bother with the source of them.
I might have done Bonjour Messieurs [Mes]Dames, no idea if correct in writing but ok verbally.
Gareth, same as, but not at all over the top Gareth.
And as someone else said, all perfectly understandable before we all started anyway 
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Not sure about your phone, but certainly mine and my ipad have a world symbol on the keyboard enabling switching to qwerty , or azerty and holding a key gives all the variants for each language including accents over letters
On iDevices, you will only see the world symbol if you have loaded more than one keyboard layout - as standard you get the emoji icon.
To add a keyboard, press and hold on the emoji icon then tap on Keyboard settings to access other language layouts.
Or you can go to Settings / General / Keyboard / Keyboards.