To start a stimulating conversation in France, there's a few things you should know first.

You can say anything to the French, and you don't have to beat around the bush or worry about polite things, it's a sport, it's a game.

Coming up, the authors of the Bonjour Effect explain how people communicate across cultures in France.

They will hear a word that they don't know, and they'll sort of pick it up like a little butterfly, and these sort of collect words like that.

With so many attractions for you to walk to all across Paris, you might find you could use a break from the intensity of the city and its maddening crowds.

Susan Cahill recommends you look for one of her favorite hidden garden spaces scattered across the city.

You go down these stone curving steps, you get to the bottom, and it's waterfalls and pools, and the most gorgeous rhododendron.

The parks and gardens of Paris, in the sport of conversation, the way they do it in France, it's just ahead, on Travel with Rick Steves.

In just a bit, the author of a series of guides to Paris recommends her favorite green spaces, where you can step away from the hubbub of the city and smell the roses in the French capital.

Let's start today's Travel with Rick Steves, with the husband and wife writing team of Jean-Benois Nédole and Julie Barneau.

They offer insights on French language and culture in their books, The Bonjour Effect, The Story of French, and 60 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.

To help explain the nuance, the gêna c'est quoi, about how people operate in France.

It doesn't matter so much how perfect your French pronunciation is. When you're in France, there are a few cultural insights.

You need to be mindful of to really communicate one-on-one with the locals. The husband and wife team of Julie Barneau and Jean-Benois Nédole shared what they discovered about how to speak French in their 2016 book called The Bonjour Effect.

They're back with us today on Travel with Rick Steves, after a book tour in France, where the book has been translated into French.

For the French, to learn about their own language, apparently, they join us now from the CBC studios in their home city of Montreal.

Bonjour. Bonjour.

This is so fascinating that you write a book as Canadian French speakers, so you're fluent in French, but you're not actually French.

How did that help you with your teaching mission of the book? You must have had a little more empathy with the rest of us tourists going to France who may have learned some French language in school, but we might be clueless about the fine points.

Well, the funny thing is that even though we speak French and I'm just to be clear, I'm not a native French speaker, I learned French in school as well.

But even though we're fluent French speakers and very familiar with French culture, we still have these terrible misunderstandings with the French.

And the origin of the book was to sort of get to the root of why we go expecting perfect communication and we want to indulge in the art of French conversation and we get there and it just doesn't work.

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