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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 177 of 243 02 March 2013 at 5:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Bye-bye, Mr. Karup"; "Well! For you, sweetie..." Let's not dwell on the fact that, out on the ice-floes, a polar
bear would actually be making a meal out of this little cutie of a harp seal: 
A caped crusader (or just a beleaguered private eye) looks out at the city, alone with his thoughts: 
"Never again repeat that. You know quite well that it's nothing but a dirty slander.": 
A sombre moment. On the radio, Billie Holiday sings "Strange fruit...": 
------- There are four volumes in this series. Of the three I've read, this one is by far my favourite. The publisher/designer made some bizarre colour choices for #4, and it's alarming garish. But Arctic-Nation has sepia-ish tones which are just right for the mood and setting of its story. Edited by songlines on 02 March 2013 at 5:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 178 of 243 02 March 2013 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Arctic Nation came from the library (not Izneo), but for anyone who missed it (and might be interested),
my little paean to Izneo is post 7 in this thread. Edited by songlines on 29 December 2013 at 8:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 179 of 243 04 March 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another breakfast beverage...
Lassi à la mangue. par Vikram Vij 
Sweet mango lassi. Translated and posted on the Pax team thread. post 155. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 180 of 243 11 March 2013 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been reading quite a few BDs recently, and am currently on book 7 (as originally penned by E.P. Jacobs) of the
Blake & Mortimer series. Wikipedia articles, in French and in English. As mentioned earlier, I had initial reservations about the Espadon titles, but the rest of the series continues with more of those ripping adventures. Have a look at some of the free (five-page) previews on Izneo: You'll see that it's definitely a lot more text-dense than many other BDs. If I were "sentence mining" (or at least "phrase mining"; some of the sentences can be a tad convoluted), this might be a good series to consider, except for the possibility of (sometimes deliberately) old-fashioned and Anglicized phrasing. Jacobs often has Blake and Mortimer using exclamations such as, "By jove!" (left in English in the French text), for example. And I expect that expressions such as "Ma parole..!" are now used about as frequently as "My word.." would be - that is, not terribly frequently. Nevertheless, I'm finding this series a tremendously enjoyable way to extend my French reading skills. A few minor quibbles: the text often doesn't have all of the accent marks inserted - possibly for lack of space? And volumes 4 and 5 (The Mystery of the Great Pyramid) have a German character, whose "German" accent is rendered through creative spelling, such as, "Très pien!... Alors, fenez donc foir mes momies, un de ches chours! Allons, che pars!" - That particular one's easy enough, but some of the other examples forced me to consult the translated editions. A note for Emk if you're reading this: you may particularly enjoy Le Mystère de la grande pyramide. One of my colleagues teaches a course in Ancient Egyptian, and he confirmed that at least some of the hieroglyphs are linguistically correct; he didn't have more time to look at more than one frame, but in that example (an inscription from a fragment in a museum) at least, the glyphs weren't just nonsense illustrations, and they actually formed understandable (and, in the context of the story, correct) phrases. Some Blake and Mortimer vocab: - écraser le champignon: to accelerate; lit. to "crush" the accelerator in a car. (Is this phrase still used?) - la pur camelotte pour touriste: real tourist junk - rapide comme l'éclair: as quick as lightning - roulant à vivre allure: travelling (in an vehicle) at high speed - si ce n'est pas ici, je donne ma langue au chat: ...I give up; I don't have the answer. See Wordreference forum on this phrase. - afin d'abreger les formalités: to shorten the formalities, to speed up the formalities (in the context of expediting a bureaucratic process) - vous êtes l'obligeance même: you are kindness itself (formal/old-fashioned as the English version, but charming) - Que fais-tu donc là, immobile comme une statue de la perplexité?: My translation would be, "What are you doing there/thus, motionless, like a figure/statue of bewilderment? But the English translation is delightful: "What are you doing there, standing like Patience on a monument?" Edited by songlines on 11 March 2013 at 8:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 181 of 243 12 March 2013 at 1:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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News sources from the francophone diaspora. Cross-posted on the Team Pax thread.
Found: a very useful page, hosted on the Stanford University Library site, with links to a large number of radio stations in sub-Saharan Africa. (Go, librarians!) SULair:SULair I've started dipping into some of the links. A few notes/updates: - Cameroon Radio and TV. Note the .cm (not .com) suffix. It lists a bilingual mid-day broadcast. (I can't play it on my computer, but assume it works. - Will have to try from my work computer.) - Frequence Verte. Link non-functioning, but the Syfia site seems to have a number of useful links to other French / African broadcasters and news agencies. - Rádio Nacional de Angola. Malware warning! This would have been Portuguese, but now presumed to be speaking the language of internet viruses. - Rádio Nacional de São Tomé e Príncipe. Portuguese, but currently non-functioning link. - Radio for Peacebuilding. No longer seems to have Portuguese. (Interestingly, it has some financial support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finland.) If you don't mind reading about issues relating to the Catholic Church, Radioecclesia (on the list) does have Portuguese. - Radio Sans Frontières. Link seems to have been hijacked to a Japanese website. I did find another Radio Sans Frontières from Burundi: RSF ------ A few other useful sites which weren't on the Stanford list: Franco Diff. Clickable map (also avail in list form) of "affiliate" radio stations. Some of the links may have only a tenuous Francophone connection, if any at all, - but the list could nevertheless be useful. Infosud.org, a Swiss-based, nonprofit press agency which tries (as per their Who are we? page indicates) to foster access to non-Western perspectives on the news. Radios francophones, links from Lehman College, CUNY. Edited by songlines on 12 March 2013 at 6:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 182 of 243 05 April 2013 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't been posting any summaries, but I have been working away at my French.
Recent highlight is that I've just come back from a short (four day) trip to Montreal, spurred on by a VIA Rail special- a $25 (!) train ticket! Travelers had to leave Toronto on the Easter weekend Saturday, and most of the slots left were for 6:45 a.m. departures, but for $25...? A steal. Returning, I was able to take advantage of another web-special fare. (Not quite as amazing as $25, but still pretty sweet.) Train travel's pretty civilized. Decent leg room, free WIFI enabled internet, downtown-to-downtown trips, and a luggage allowance rather more generous than that allowed by airlines. And that luggage allowance was important, as I used this trip to bookstore-crawl: mainly French language, and mainly used books. Recently, it's been a source of some frustration that there's really nowhere in Toronto which is a decent source of French books, and particularly second-hand French books. Some bookstores have a sprinkling of used textbooks, and the very very occasional "classic" literary work, but that's about it. So. The first of a few notes on Montreal bookstores: First: Librarie Michel Fortin. http://www.librairiemichelfortin.com/fr/ Language geek heaven. This two-storefront-wide bookstore seems to expand, Tardis-like, once you enter. Huge sections of ESL and FSL material of course, including a wall of shelves labelled for French study: "autodictate", "grammaires", "conjugaisons", as well as DELF, phonetics, and other sub-topics. 
And on the facing bays, rows of titles like the CLE series "Grammaire progressive du français"; perhaps Librairie Michel Fortin supplies some of the language schools? 
A lot of material for numerous other languages, including much Assimil, though it's not obvious from my photo below. (The MF website claims to offer material for 250 languages; I didn't try to verify that with a count.) - And not a Rosetta Stone box in sight! 
A wonderful place to visit, though I didn't have as much browsing time as I'd have liked. Arekkusu, you may be pleased to know that copies of "Le québécois en 10 leçons" were prominently placed, almost at eye level, in the window display immediately next to the entry. I asked for a copy, and the clerk grabbed one from a small pile right at the service desk. 
Next (and I hope soon, or not too much later, at any rate): instalments on some of the following: La boîte à son Drawn and Quarterly Librairie l'Échange Librairie l'Écume des jours Librairie Gallimard Librairie le port de tête Mona Lisait Planète BD Renaud-Bray I'm omitting the English-language stores visited, btw. So many books, so little time... Edited by songlines on 05 April 2013 at 4:18pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5374 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 183 of 243 08 April 2013 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
They are indeed a very important supplier for language schools. They are also the biggest supplier of Assimil in North America, if I'm not mistaken.
Whoa, that's great! I knew they kept copies at the service counter, but I didn't know about the window display! It's definitely selling very well there. I hope you enjoy the book! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5423 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 184 of 243 08 April 2013 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If I remember from my last visit there, Michel Fortin also carries an excellent product made in Montreal, the Essential French 1 wall calendar, that can also be found on the website Fluent French Now
1 person has voted this message useful |
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