|
 |
French - Past Historic | ||
Tags: Morphology | French | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 9 of 12 10 May 2012 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
And that's even more rare than passé simple. By a huge margin too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 12 10 May 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The passé simple is everywhere in books, even modern pulp thrillers that
Americans would read on the beach. If you want to be read random works of modern fiction, you'll absolutely need to recognize and understand it. Fortunately, you really only need two dozen irregular stems and two sets of regular endings, and you only need to know the third person unless you're reading Le Petit Prince. I've never heard it used in day-to-day speech, but I found it once in Tin Tin (when a character is telling a story about something that happened 20 years before). And if you listen really carefully to episode 2 of the first season of Buffy, you'll hear Giles the librarian say (transcript quoted from here):
But he's consciously telling a story here, trying to evoke the ancient past in a mythological style. Basically, the passé simple is used to narrate stories. When the time comes to go ahead and read real fiction—even modern fiction—just go ahead and learn it. You'll need a few hours, and then you'll have a much wider choice of books. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FELlX Diglot Groupie France Joined 4771 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 11 of 12 10 May 2012 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
I have never heard or read imperfect subjunctive out of the context of a joke. Passé simple is more common, but only written. Unless you plan to read French literature, or are aiming for an advanced level of French, you can skip over it. Edited by FELlX on 10 May 2012 at 5:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 12 11 May 2012 at 11:05am | IP Logged | ||
|
I've never actually spent time studying the passé simple or the imperfect subjunctive,
but after reading Le Petit Prince I recognise and understand them quite easily. They seem strange at first but you get the hang of them quickly. I doubt I could produce them easily apart from the most common and regular ones though, but it's not like I'll ever need to so I see no reason to spend time learning them when I could spend that time learning useful things. Interestingly I knew an Algerian guy a while ago who, when saying goodbye after meeting somebody, would always say "ce fut un plaisir". 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
