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Meilleur mais il y a beaucoup à faire...
Feb. 19th, 2008 07:15 amOn the happy side of things, I must've had a breakthrough with my French recently. I don't know what triggered it. All i know is that I am not stalled when I start reading French.
I used to need to sound things out in my head. I'd scan a sentence for words I knew, go back and start tackling words one at a time. Then I would see whether the prepositional phrases changed things into idioms. Sometimes I'd have to write down a word or two for a trip to the dictionary.
One of my favorite texts for learning French are crime novels. They're easy and they pull you along. Also the French language hosts some of the best writers in the genre, specifically Georges Simenon (the man from Liege that gave us the Maigret series) and Leo Malet. Malet's texts have been turned into amazing graphic novels by Jacques Tardi, an artist obsessed with line drawings of city scapes (especially bridges) from another time.
I picked up a copy of 120, Rue de la Gare back in 1999. I recall seeing the book for $42 in Schoenhof's, the foreign language bookstore in Harvard Square, about a year after picking up the book for $23 Canadian (which back then was less than usd18) at DéBéDé in Montreal. I love looking at all the Vichy-era material he integrated into the backgrounds.
I would then try to read and get very little of it. I fathomed the story, but more from the pics than the words.
I dug the book out of a box recently and now it's almost a breeze. "Arthur, the head of Recruitment, never showed any humor. He had filled our tobacco from what he'd confiscated out of our pouches the night before, to the men that we signed up." I only had to look up one of the French words from scratch (veille: brink of night, night watch), confirm another (immatriculer, to register a name to a record, close to our "matriculate" but without our implication of education) and then learn a word from German that I wasn't guessing well (Aufnahme). I never studied German -- just heard some here and there from my mother -- so I was thinking "in-naming" and not getting a lot farther. Turned out I wasn't far off.
There is still plenty that I have to revisit after a try. I have a better idea how to parse an idiom, how to sense where the words are going from their context.
I am still researching French immersion schools. This doesn't seem to be getting easier, just more irksome. Just as I find one that looks interesting, I realize I don't have much to tell it apart from the others. The one web site that claims to review them has little to discern.
There is one place that wants to stand out: a school in Belgium that only offers one-on-one sessions. It costs several times more than the rest: €2295 (about $3400) for the cheapest of their one-week sessions, although room and board are included.
$3400 is exactly what my freshman year at SUNY-Binghamton cost in 1992. Is one week of deep French immersion in the Ardennes worth as much as a year of university?
In contrast, the school I found in Lyon (a city that fascinates me and I cannot wait to visit) charges €345 ($506) per week for its most intense program. I can either get a furnished apartment nearby for €371 ($544) or stay with a host family (which sounds more interesting).
When I was staying in Sydney, I met a bunch of French and Belgian kids studying English at a nearby tech school. That seems ideal: spend the day studying, spend the evening drinking and practicing. Then again I could wind up like they did, only speaking my native tongue and bitching about who is getting any in the crew.
I've been working on a single sheet that compiles every single page I've read to date. I didn't plan to be obsessed with the problem: I was just tired of looking up the same information repeatedly. I started putting it all into one text file.
Then I realized how many web sites were just trying to make money on the lack of centralized data. Several use the travel agent cruise model, telling you all sorts of details about various programs but never telling you the names of the programs. Then they ask you to fill out a form to get details slash sign up.
I don't think I'll feel done until I can make a confident decision. I'd like to get it done during the next couple, so that I can travel before the expensive part of European travel. Once I have the details, I will let y'all know and possibly build a web page.
I used to need to sound things out in my head. I'd scan a sentence for words I knew, go back and start tackling words one at a time. Then I would see whether the prepositional phrases changed things into idioms. Sometimes I'd have to write down a word or two for a trip to the dictionary.
One of my favorite texts for learning French are crime novels. They're easy and they pull you along. Also the French language hosts some of the best writers in the genre, specifically Georges Simenon (the man from Liege that gave us the Maigret series) and Leo Malet. Malet's texts have been turned into amazing graphic novels by Jacques Tardi, an artist obsessed with line drawings of city scapes (especially bridges) from another time.
I picked up a copy of 120, Rue de la Gare back in 1999. I recall seeing the book for $42 in Schoenhof's, the foreign language bookstore in Harvard Square, about a year after picking up the book for $23 Canadian (which back then was less than usd18) at DéBéDé in Montreal. I love looking at all the Vichy-era material he integrated into the backgrounds.
I would then try to read and get very little of it. I fathomed the story, but more from the pics than the words.
I dug the book out of a box recently and now it's almost a breeze. "Arthur, the head of Recruitment, never showed any humor. He had filled our tobacco from what he'd confiscated out of our pouches the night before, to the men that we signed up." I only had to look up one of the French words from scratch (veille: brink of night, night watch), confirm another (immatriculer, to register a name to a record, close to our "matriculate" but without our implication of education) and then learn a word from German that I wasn't guessing well (Aufnahme). I never studied German -- just heard some here and there from my mother -- so I was thinking "in-naming" and not getting a lot farther. Turned out I wasn't far off.
There is still plenty that I have to revisit after a try. I have a better idea how to parse an idiom, how to sense where the words are going from their context.
I am still researching French immersion schools. This doesn't seem to be getting easier, just more irksome. Just as I find one that looks interesting, I realize I don't have much to tell it apart from the others. The one web site that claims to review them has little to discern.
There is one place that wants to stand out: a school in Belgium that only offers one-on-one sessions. It costs several times more than the rest: €2295 (about $3400) for the cheapest of their one-week sessions, although room and board are included.
$3400 is exactly what my freshman year at SUNY-Binghamton cost in 1992. Is one week of deep French immersion in the Ardennes worth as much as a year of university?
In contrast, the school I found in Lyon (a city that fascinates me and I cannot wait to visit) charges €345 ($506) per week for its most intense program. I can either get a furnished apartment nearby for €371 ($544) or stay with a host family (which sounds more interesting).
When I was staying in Sydney, I met a bunch of French and Belgian kids studying English at a nearby tech school. That seems ideal: spend the day studying, spend the evening drinking and practicing. Then again I could wind up like they did, only speaking my native tongue and bitching about who is getting any in the crew.
I've been working on a single sheet that compiles every single page I've read to date. I didn't plan to be obsessed with the problem: I was just tired of looking up the same information repeatedly. I started putting it all into one text file.
Then I realized how many web sites were just trying to make money on the lack of centralized data. Several use the travel agent cruise model, telling you all sorts of details about various programs but never telling you the names of the programs. Then they ask you to fill out a form to get details slash sign up.
I don't think I'll feel done until I can make a confident decision. I'd like to get it done during the next couple, so that I can travel before the expensive part of European travel. Once I have the details, I will let y'all know and possibly build a web page.
