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Si ta tasse serait en plein...
Mar. 27th, 2009 03:05 amSaturday morning I will be attending seven hours of French immersion. That is my big birthday present to myself, other than getting to hang out with lots of friends each day of that week.
There are three levels of the immersion: beginner, intermediate and advanced. I just barely qualified for advanced, but it turned out I'd've been alone. So they moved me to the intermediate class with three other people, each of whom is also at the high end of intermediate. They also said I could bail with a refund if it doesn't suit me after an hour. I'm always up for seeing what I could learn.
I'm reviewing my notes from class in Rambouillet. Most of the notes are very clear and in French. However there was one day where I noted in English, "Don't eat Nutella with you fingers in public." This had deeply disgusted a teacher. It took me a little while to realize they want spreads to be on breads and nowhere else. I had to assume I'd looked like someone snorting foie gras.
I still haven't written a lot about those amazing three weeks because I was so busy during them. Which would you rather do: write an LJ post or go drinking with metal heads in a cute town? I'd get homesick, so I'd write. Then the wicked intensely cute Kiwi girl and I would talk about random shit and you wouldn't hear from me. I learned there is an accent even more nasal than a Long Islander's, and man it can overwhelm.
My roommate and I were watching old episodes of Freaks and Geeks. Oh man, that episode with the Billy Joel music and the three guys liking the new girl before they lose her -- it kinda touched me.
I wanted to review the structure of time prepositions, something I still screw up even though I've got great notes about it. For example:
Il y a deux ans je suis allé jusqu'à San Francisco pendant huit heures.
Two years ago I went up to San Francisco for eight hours.
Note that "il y a" refers to a time in the past but "pendant" refers to a specific duration of time. Both are used in the past tense. "Pendant" really means "during", but the word "pour" (for) is only used to describe a fixed length of time that will happen in the future (meaning you get to some point X in the future and then another set of time will commence).
English is the most Romance language of the Germanic languages; French is the most Germanic of the Romance languages. They use constructions we find familiar and we borrow a lot from them as they do from us. However, we have no idea where our syntactical order comes from (Dutch) nor our concepts of verb time (Celtic languages) but like to think we use Latin grammar. We don't: we just yell at our kids for not guessing that.
Americans are an Aristotelian people, observing traits and working from loose assumptions. We are in fact more inductive than deductive, willing to let things happen from the new stuff that arrives because they stuff we had before wasn't always so great (America without foreign cuisine would be horrible). French is a Platonic language, spoken by a people that correct each other not to be rude but to get each other toward an ideal of the language. In contrast, we run more on the fear that Lolcats will be the King's English of 2200, rather than the hope that we will formalize a stronger grammar. The French are right to be suspicious of treaties written in English, eh?
I miss that feeling of linguistic material being important. I went to a place and had to learn how to function in their language if I wanted to have a good time. Perhaps I'll wind up teaching French some day, after I practice teaching English in France -- after I save enough cash to leave here again.
There are three levels of the immersion: beginner, intermediate and advanced. I just barely qualified for advanced, but it turned out I'd've been alone. So they moved me to the intermediate class with three other people, each of whom is also at the high end of intermediate. They also said I could bail with a refund if it doesn't suit me after an hour. I'm always up for seeing what I could learn.
I'm reviewing my notes from class in Rambouillet. Most of the notes are very clear and in French. However there was one day where I noted in English, "Don't eat Nutella with you fingers in public." This had deeply disgusted a teacher. It took me a little while to realize they want spreads to be on breads and nowhere else. I had to assume I'd looked like someone snorting foie gras.
I still haven't written a lot about those amazing three weeks because I was so busy during them. Which would you rather do: write an LJ post or go drinking with metal heads in a cute town? I'd get homesick, so I'd write. Then the wicked intensely cute Kiwi girl and I would talk about random shit and you wouldn't hear from me. I learned there is an accent even more nasal than a Long Islander's, and man it can overwhelm.
My roommate and I were watching old episodes of Freaks and Geeks. Oh man, that episode with the Billy Joel music and the three guys liking the new girl before they lose her -- it kinda touched me.
I wanted to review the structure of time prepositions, something I still screw up even though I've got great notes about it. For example:
Il y a deux ans je suis allé jusqu'à San Francisco pendant huit heures.
Two years ago I went up to San Francisco for eight hours.
Note that "il y a" refers to a time in the past but "pendant" refers to a specific duration of time. Both are used in the past tense. "Pendant" really means "during", but the word "pour" (for) is only used to describe a fixed length of time that will happen in the future (meaning you get to some point X in the future and then another set of time will commence).
| type | past | present | future |
|---|---|---|---|
| start of time | il y a | depuis | dans |
| duration | pendant | en | pour |
English is the most Romance language of the Germanic languages; French is the most Germanic of the Romance languages. They use constructions we find familiar and we borrow a lot from them as they do from us. However, we have no idea where our syntactical order comes from (Dutch) nor our concepts of verb time (Celtic languages) but like to think we use Latin grammar. We don't: we just yell at our kids for not guessing that.
Americans are an Aristotelian people, observing traits and working from loose assumptions. We are in fact more inductive than deductive, willing to let things happen from the new stuff that arrives because they stuff we had before wasn't always so great (America without foreign cuisine would be horrible). French is a Platonic language, spoken by a people that correct each other not to be rude but to get each other toward an ideal of the language. In contrast, we run more on the fear that Lolcats will be the King's English of 2200, rather than the hope that we will formalize a stronger grammar. The French are right to be suspicious of treaties written in English, eh?
I miss that feeling of linguistic material being important. I went to a place and had to learn how to function in their language if I wanted to have a good time. Perhaps I'll wind up teaching French some day, after I practice teaching English in France -- after I save enough cash to leave here again.
