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Spanky’s Romulan 18 months of French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5955 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes  Studies: French | Message 17 of 119 05 July 2012 at 6:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Studied the future tense today - what could be easier than figuring out if something is
going to happen in the future (as opposed to the past or present) and then just using the future tense. Conjugation is a snap and only a mercifully-small number of irregular stems, which happen to be the same stems for the conditionnel tense, so a bit of a 2-fer in memorizing these. FAC - future tense intro FAC - future tense conjugation French.about.com says this of the future tense: “one of the simplest French tenses”. This is very welcome news indeed for one who is engaged in grappling with the goliathian French language beast. All seems well and manageable, until one reads this: "In journalism and other factual narration, the future is often used in French even though the events are in the past. Né en Martinique, Aimé Césaire étudiera à Paris et redécouvrira l'Afrique Born in Martinique, Aimé Césaire studied in Paris and rediscovered Africa." Using the future tense to describe something that clearly has happened in the past? Madness. French’s true treacherous nature reveals itself yet again. Took the very short quiz, though under protest and with some suspicion: FAC - test re: future tense Edited by Spanky on 05 July 2012 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 119 05 July 2012 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In spoken European French, laisser tomber means either "to drop" or (in the
imperative) "Drop it!" Faire tomber means "to knock over". These are both perfectly normal spoken French, as far as I can tell. I've never heard any of the Quebec versions. Or more likely, I've heard them and failed to understand them. Another fun expression with faire that's worth picking apart word by word until you can explain it: Je me suis fait engueuler. This means "I got chewed out." Here, se faire translates as "to get (myself)", sort of a semi-passive construction, and it because it's reflexive, you use suis to form the passé composé. And engueuler comes from la gueule, the mouth of a animal, which is used as derogatory term for a human mouth or face. There's a scene in season 2 of Buffy contre les vampires where Buffy's mother is dating a man who turns out to be the bad guy. (A romantic interest turns out to be the monster of the week? So not a spoiler.) He's just threatened Buffy with a mental asylum. Buffy starts yelling at him angrily, and the villain complains about “ta petite gueule”—just before punching her halfway across the room. Buffy wins, of course. And yeah, my knowledge of colloquial French vocabulary is basically a long series of interlinked digressions and cultural references. :-)
Repeat after me: "I have no need to worry about this now. I have no need to worry about this now. When I actually need to know this—probably long after I speak conversational French—I'll either figure it out from context or look it up. I could pass a DELF B2 exam without knowing this." Apply this mantra liberally any time a grammar book starts to freak you out with a long list of exceptions. Remember, your goal isn't to make intellectual sense of French. Your goal is to get comfortable with French. Sure, this means looking stuff up. But it also means closely observing a lot of French in the wild. Your brain will eventually see enough French that it starts seeming semi-logical. Your brain probably doesn't want to do this, but if you make it look at enough mostly-comprehensible French, your brain will eventually give up and just get used to it. The first time I read a French grammar book, it took me about two hours, and my interior monologue was mostly, "Uh-huh, uh-huh. Well, obviously. Oh, so that's how that works! Uh-huh. How else would you do it? Oops, gotta learn that one. Of course you don't use the passive quite so much in French; you've usually got 2 or 3 nicer-sounding choices. Well, duh, anything else would be really ugly French," and so on. So study grammar when it's helpful, and it feels like you're accomplishing something. But when grammar seems weird and illogical and impossible, go do something fun in French. This advice was brought to you the Committee Against the Unnecessary Proliferation of Mimes. :-) Edited by emk on 05 July 2012 at 8:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5955 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 19 of 119 23 August 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Pourquoi y a-t-il un essaim de mimes devant la porte? Oh right, forgot to study for quite a few weeks …. French.about.com – word of the day: essaim FAC - essaim Many thanks emk for the post and for your continuing support of CAUPM - the world would undoubtedly be a better place if the goals of this worthy organization were more completely achieved.
I no longer watch Buffy mostly for that reason. D'habitude, j'encourage les monstres! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5955 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 20 of 119 26 August 2012 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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French.about.com - manquer
manquer - idiomatic expression manquer – to miss manquer + de + DIRECT OBJECT – to lack something manquer + de + VERB – to fail to do something That all makes sense, but the devious word order for manquer + à for 'to miss someone or something' - elle ne manque pas d'air, cette langue! Got at least 100% on the manquer test, just cause I am awesome: manquer quiz 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5470 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 21 of 119 26 August 2012 at 3:10am | IP Logged | |||||
Fortunately in Canadian/Québécois French one can always use the very common s'ennuyer de form which is more logical for an English speaker. Je m'ennuie de toi I miss you Il s'ennuie de Montréal He misses Montreal 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5208 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 119 26 August 2012 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Which then raises another problem/question: How does one distinguish between "he misses Montreal" and "he is bored of Montreal"? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5470 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 23 of 119 26 August 2012 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Montréal l'ennuie Montreal bores him Apparently it is not just a Québec thing but it is considered old-fashioned in France. Here are two discussions of this usage: wordreference.com offqc.com Edited by microsnout on 26 August 2012 at 6:40pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5208 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 119 26 August 2012 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ah. Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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